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ELLA MARIE HOLMES 


Sowing Seed in Assam 


MISSIONARY LIFE AND LABOURS 
IN NORTHEAST INDIA 


By 
E. MARIE HOLMES 


of the 
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society 


Introduction by 
HELEN BARRETT MONTGOMERY 


ILLUSTRATED 
I res 


PRI 
ane OF PRINCES 7m 


APR % 1999 






New York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, MCMxxv, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


AMERICAN BAPTIST FOREIGN MISSION SOCIETIES 





Prinied in the United States of America 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


INTRODUCTION 


MONG all the missionaries whom the 
yN Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mis- 
sion Society has sent into the field, one 
of the most individual and useful was Miss E. 
Marie Holmes of Gauhati, Assam. Miss Holmes 
was sent to take care of a newly-established Girls’ 
School in Gauhati, and of this she made a unique 
institution, known throughout the length and 
breadth of Assam. 

The education of women is still in a very back- 
ward state in that part of the world, and in decid- 
ing the curriculum and plans for her new school, 
Miss Holmes felt that there was great danger of 
taking the girls away from the simple surroundings 
in which they must live. She put no great amount 
of money in pretentious buildings, therefore, but 
used the cottage-plan and followed the native line 
of architecture in the very primitive buildings 
which she erected. Each of these buildings housed 
a family of girls of different ages, with a house- 
mother. The girls were taught native cooking and 
sewing. Weaving looms were set up on the ve- 
randa, and all the arts of everyday life in their own 
villages were taught. Little waif-children and 


babies were taken in, and the house-family of girls 
3 


4 INTRODUCTION 


were taught to take care of these little ones. Les- 
sons in baby-nurture which were none the less lov- 
ing, because thoroughly scientific, were given the 
girls. They learned how to bathe and clothe and 
feed the children. 

At once a change of feeling in regard to the edu- 
cation of girls began to be evident in the com- 
munity. It had been felt before that girls who 
were sent to the Christian school became too highly 
educated and too refined for ordinary life, and 
were of no use to their families. Whether this 
criticism were just or not, it could no longer be 
made concerning the Gauhati girls, who were edu- 
cated not away from, but into their surroundings. 
The school soon came to the attention of the Gov- 
ernment, and has had a constant and flattering 
growth ever since. 

Perhaps Miss Holmes was distinguished even 
more as an evangelist than as a teacher. Certainly 
the deep passion of her heart was to get so near to 
the people that she could share their lives and 
troubles, and lead them sympathetically to the 
great Burden-Bearer. 

After some years Miss Holmes was obliged to 
return home to care for a beloved sister who had 


gone out to assist her in the kindergarten depart- 
ment, and became a victim of tuberculosis. She 


stayed at home with her sister Nettie until the 
death of the latter in 1922. She then returned to 
Assam, intending to give herself wholly to evan- 


INTRODUCTION 5 


gelistic work; but found herself physically unable 
to endure the strain. 

There is an unusual quality that runs through 
Miss Holmes’ narrative. She makes you see things 
and hear things, almost as if you were on the 
ground, and her reactions are not ordinary ones. 
It is a great pleasure to be asked to write a brief 
Introduction to a book written by one who en- 
deared herself, not only to her colleagues, but to 
the Board which sent her forth. I sincerely hope 
for it a great future of usefulness. 

HELEN BARRETT MONTGOMERY 


Meas H 
Vite hp 


yer 


it 
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DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER-MINE: 

While writing these pages, I have thought much 
of the debts I owe you and can never pay. Before 
I was born you began the second-mile service of 
love that has not once lagged in all these years. 
You never bargained for wages and have taken no 
account of hours, though working overtime; have 
never gone on strike nor taken holiday. 

For all the clothes you have provided, laun- 
dered, and mended, for all the sweeping and 
dusting, for all the cooking and nursing and com- 
forting, for all the treats you provided through 
sacrifice, for happy playtime and evenings around 
the lamp, for bedtime kisses and prayers, for a 
refuge with ever-open door to warm love that un- 
derstands without questioning, for my home and 
my sisters, for all precious memories of your love, 
I offer this little book in loving and grateful tribute. 

Affectionately your grown-up Girl, 


ELLA MARIE 
Redlands, Calif. 





Contents 


“ LULLABY Days ” ; ; ‘ ade 
. SCHOOL AND Factory YEARS. Hans a! 

. GETTING READY—NORTHFIELD AND 
NEWTON CENTRE. : é Rap Jb 

. AssAaM— THE WETTEST LAND ON 
EARTH ; ‘ ; ’ : Ad 
SoME LETTERS FROM THE FIELD Bane 

. ON FuRLOUGH AND BACK TO ASSAM: 
My SIstER NETTIE . ; : EOS 
. CARRYING ON : ; s : Pe AZS 
. TIMEs OF STRESS . . ; , . 160 
. WaysIDE MINISTRIES . : , . 169 


CHRISTMAS ON A MIssION STATION . 176 


. Last Days IN ASSAM: ORDERED 


HoME . ‘ i : E e . 181 


\ r 
RS ds Wes F ft uh ‘ 





ILLUSTRATIONS 


Facing Page 


Ella Marie Holmes 

A Dug-out on the Kulsi River : 
School Girls Wearing Their Jopi or Urbrelts ; 
Crossing the Boko River in a Queen’s Chair 
“My Four Adopted Brownies ” 


Ella Marie Holmes—‘ One of those Foreign 
Missionaries ” 


“Sister Nettie””—On ee eve of sailing Ae 
Assam 


The Daily Bath eh Toes Satribari 
Ox-cart and Driver : 
A Friendly Hindu Family of Good Caste , 


Title 


50 
50 
74 
74 


98 


waz 





I 
“LULLABY DAYS” 


HEY were willing to have me although 
they did not need me and could not 
afford me. Already there were little 
blue-eyed Bertha, four years and a month, and 
little brown-eyed Maude, who came as a present 
to Bertha the day two candles burned on her 
birthday cake. There was Mother’s mother to 
care for, too. There was house rent to pay and 
Father’s salary of fifty dollars a month was the 
only income. 

When two candles burned on my birthday cake, 
Mother’s fourth baby had been heir to the baby 
carriage for a month, and I had been promoted 
to the crib. Nettie, this fourth baby, was the most 
indispensable member of the family. I have tried 
to picture the years without her, in her stead an 
additional dress or two every year for the rest of 
us, an occasional extra dish on the table, and 
slightly different tasks filling Mother’s days. Had 
my parents given me life then decided that they 
could not afford to add to their family and had 
denied life to my younger sister, they would have 
robbed me of the greatest enrichment my life has 


known; they would have denied to my other sis- 
11 


12 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


ters and to themselves the benison of that quiet 
life whose daily living through the years taught 
us all the strength and beauty of goodness. 
Scores of men and women, and hosts of little chil- 
dren, would have found life poorer and more diffi- 
cult had Nettie not come their way. The mem- 
bers of our little family group were as different 
from one another as though they were unrelated, 
yet each brought a peculiar contribution that 
seemed essential to the best development of the 
others. In spite of our faults and differences, 
clannish love and loyalty welded us together in 
happy home-life—that seal of God’s presence 
among men. 

One of my earliest memories is of Mother put- 
ting us to bed at night. After she had heard our 
prayers, tucked us in and kissed us good-night, 
she would stoop to turn down the wick of the little 
flat-bottomed oil lamp on the tiny platform land- 
ing at the top of the stairs, her white, starched 
apron gleaming in the lamp-light. ‘No, no. 
That’s too low; higher than that,” we would call 
out until the flame was adjusted to suit us. 
Leaving her little ones safely tucked-in for the 
night, their happy whispers and giggles doing 
short but hopeless battle with weariness and 
sleep, Mother would go down the narrow, un- 
carpeted stairs to a heaped up mending basket, 
one ear open for sounds of the children up stairs 
and the other open to whatever Father might have 


* LULLABY DAYS ” 13 


to recount of the day’s doings as he puffed at his 
pipe and turned the pages of his paper before his 
preliminary sleep on the dining-room lounge. Not 
the pay envelopes, but those evening hours was 
the “ day’s reward” for Father and Mother all 
those hard-working years of our childhood. 

After Mother had lowered the lamp and left us, 
Bertha would tell fairy tales or Mother Goose 
rhymes, punctuating the tales with yawns as her 
voice sounded more and more remote until there 
was no listening ear to hear what befell the prince 
in the enchanted castle. 

There is another childhood memory that I thank 
God American children need no longer have. 
Often we ran errands for neighbours. I was six, 
possibly seven, years old when a neighbour sent me 
to buy a bucket of beer; “ rushing the growler ” 
was the very descriptive phrase used to describe 
the process. It was midsummer. The saloon was 
four or five blocks away, down by the Seventh- 
street wharf. A short cut led through several 
lumber-yards with cinder driveways. I took the 
short cut, lifting my bare feet gingerly over the 
rough cinders, hot under the midday sun. When 
I rang the bell at the side door marked “ Ladies’ 
Entrance” a white-aproned bartender opened 
the door, lifted me and the bucket in his arms, 
and taking me into the saloon, stood me on the 
counter where I was made much of while he filled 
the can with frothy beer. I went home with a 


14 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


fistful of large salty pretzels in one hand, and in 
the other the can of beer for which service my 
neighbour gave me two cents. 

The only pennies we had, were earned doing 
errands for neighbours. In those days a penny 
would buy a pickle with a piece of brown paper 
at the end to catch the dripping vinegar, a strip of 
fresh cocoanut fished by the grocer from a jar of 
water (it may have been cocoanut milk that was 
in the jar). You could get two long black licorice 
shoestrings for a penny, or gamble on chocolate 
turtles, some of which hid a penny within their 
cream-centers, or have a grab-bag of left-over can- 
dies with sometimes a surprise ring or trinket in 
it. But you could not buy less than two cents 
worth of beefsteak candy. Beefsteak candy was 
a kind of fondant with white streaks through it for 
the fat, and pink folds for the lean meat. 

Father and Mother did not attend church in 
those days but they sent us children to Sunday 
school. In the afternoons we attended a mission 
school where we were given little wooden barrels 
to fill with money and return. I got enough pen- 
nies in my barrel to make a pleasant jingle when I 
shook it. Once when I happened to shake the 
barrel with the slit side down, a penny rolled out. 
More shaking brought forth a second penny. Two 
pennies in my hand at once! That had not hap- 
pened before since I knew about beefsteak candy. 
If both of those pennies were mine I could sample 


“LULLABY DAYS” 15 


beefsteak candy. Some day I would have two 
pennies at once. I would save my next penny until 
I got another and then I could buy the candy. As 
I started to drop the pennies back through the slit 
in the barrel it occurred to me that it was useless 
to wait to save the pennies when I might just as 
well borrow the two right in my hand and pay 
them back when I had earned two cents. So I 
ate two cents worth of beefsteak candy and it was 
so good! Better even than I had thought it would 
be. For some days after I did not get a penny for 
errands, but I went around to the candy store and 
looked at the beefsteak. There was not very 
much left and maybe the next lot would not be so 
good. 

So I went home and got the barrel just to see 
if I could tell how many pennies were in it. After 
I had shaken out two, I visited the candy store 
again and had more than a look at the candy. 
After several other beefsteak feasts, there was 
nothing left in the barrel to jingle when I shook it. 

Although pennies were scarce when we were chil- 
dren, and we knew but little of confectioners’ 
goodies, still we had frequent family treats. How 
Mamma ever managed it, on her ten and twelve 
dollars a week, has ever been to me a mystery. 
Every Sunday there was a tin plate of brittle taffy 
that broke in kaleidoscope figures when hit on the 
bottom of the cooling pan with a knife handle. 
Sometimes there was a cake with icing or custard 


16 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


between the layers; or there was popped corn, 
pudding which had been frozen in the snow or 
frost; there were black walnuts or hickory nuts, 
cracked between two flat irons and the kernels ex- 
tracted with wire hairpins. 

There were eventful days with a swing in the 
woodshed on which we took turns. A “ go” lasted 
until the swing came still after hard pushing while 
we recited: 


“Charlie Buck had money enough 
To lock tt up in the storehouse; 
But when he died he closed his eyes 
And never saw money any more. 
A high swing, a low swing, 
A very good swing for Charlie Buck.” 


A board over a keg or a box see-sawed to the 
tune of: 
“See-saw, Margery Daw, 
Johnnie shall have a new master ; 


He shall make but a penny a day 
Because he can’t work any faster.” 


Button-strings were all the rage in those days 
and every youngster teased her mother for pretty 
buttons. When a string of threaded beauties was 
swung awhirl by an expert then held taut at either 
end while the buttons spun elliptical circles of 
glistening beauty, the sight made all envious be- 
holders hold their breath with admiration. An ex- 
change of buttons was made with all the haggling 


*“ LULLABY DAYS” 17 


of an Oriental bazaar or a Los Angeles real estate 
agent. 

- Annually, with summer clothes appeared “ light 
boxes.” These were generally shoe-boxes with 
stars, moons, fruit, flower and animal shapes cut 
from the pasteboard and the spaces filled in with 
brightly coloured tissue paper, a candle within the 
box making the gay paper cuts shine brightly on 
dark nights. A string pulled through one end of 
the box enabled it to be dragged over the pavement 
behind the happy owner. Some boxes were built 
two or three tiers high. It was a dangerous toy for 
little children and fatal accidents probably brought 
it into disfavour. 

Ring-games were part of summer sport, too. 
While fathers and mothers sat on front porches 
enjoying the cool and rest after the long day of 
hard work, and called back and forth from porch to 
porch in neighbourly fashion, their children made 
the night merry with “ Lazy Mary,” “ The Farmer 
in the Dell,” ‘‘ Waiting for a Partner,” “Go In 
and Out the Windows,” ‘‘ London Bridge,” “‘ Here 
We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” ‘“ Drop the 
Handkerchief,” and other childish roundelays. 

During the winter different cliques used to get 
up shows to which an admission of from two to 
ten pins was charged. The show would sometimes 
be a trick, a story acted out by the children dressed 
up for their parts, or by paper people on a paper 
stage; sometimes it would be a real program with 


18 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


pieces, songs, dances, and dogs and cats doing 
tricks. 

All the year around Saturday was bath-night, 
and that was such a good time when we lived in a 
house with a zinc tub with a slippery, sloping 
head. We would soap the slide, sit up at the top 
and speed down into the bath with a splash. A 
bath in a wooden tub on the kitchen floor was not 
nearly so popular. 

When, for some weeks, great earthen pipes 
were strung along one side of a street at the back 
of our house, there was endless fun playing tunnel 
and crawling through the pipes a whole block’s 
length. Then one sad day the pipes were lowered 
into the ditch, and after the workmen went home 
we played tunnel one more last time before the dirt 
was thrown over the pipes. When I emerged from 
the far end of the tunnel, hands, face, white apron, 
stockings, shoes, were daubed with red clay. I did 
not dare let my mother see me like that and did 
not know how to keep her from seeing me. One 
of the boys suggested that I get under the old 
wooden pump which stood in front of the candy 
store and have one of the children pump while the 
others scrubbed me. This promised some improve- 
ment at least, so I scraped away at the clay while 
we stole along the back alley to the pump. I 
stooped under the spout and was pumped upon and 
scrubbed with a vengeance, but came forth from 
the operation feeling and looking worse than be- 


* LULLABY DAYS” 19 


fore. Running, weeping and wailing, I sped in 
search of the mother I had before sought to escape, 
while little rivulets irrigated all the block-and-a- 
half which lay between the pump and home. 

On one occasion I tumbled accidently into one 
of the nicest times I ever had. Mother used to sit 
backwards on the window-sill to wash windows. 
One day I sat thus in a second-story window to see 
what it felt like. I turned a somersault back- 
wards into a trash-barrel where a broken thin red 
glass pitcher stuck into my foot. When mother 
picked me up she held me close and had everybody 
jumping around filling the orders she gave. After 
the glass was extracted I was put to bed in Net- 
tie’s cot in Mother’s room and I had to stay there 
day and night for some time. But I enjoyed it 
immensely. All the children wanted to give me 
some of their treasures; Mother used to sit by me 
and feed me; and every evening Father brought 
me home a roll-picture advertising the Atlantic and 
Pacific Tea Stores, a brand of soap or condensed 
milk, or an insurance company. Sweet to my soul 
was the sight of the anxious faces of my sisters and 
little friends as they asked how I felt. As I got 
better and these same children presumed upon old 
familiarity I gave them to understand that a girl 
with a cut foot could never again be just the same 
ordinary child she had been before. 

After my foot had healed, my mother made me, 
out of my.grandmother’s old circular cape, the 


20 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


most beautiful black satin dress with a guimpe of 
yellow silk and a spray of buttercups embroidered 
around the yoke. I must have looked well in it, 
for Mother told Father to take me by Uncle Jim’s. 
Now Uncle Jim kept a store and Mother’s object 
in sending me to him was to make him envious of 
his poorer brother’s treasures. It was Sunday 
afternoon but he took us down stairs and gave me 
a bag of round dome-shaped cakes with pink and 
chocolate icing on them. That same afternoon on 
our way home Father took me into a power-house 
with great throbbing engines and whirling wheels; 
then to a fire-house where one of the firemen held 
me up so that I could rub the soft velvet noses of 
the big horses. When I got back home with my 
bag of cakes and stories of adventure I found it 
just as interesting to be well and have a black satin 
dress with buttercups on it and be carried around 
and shown off as it had been to have a cut foot and 
sympathetic folk hovering around. There was 
some sort of pleasure in everything that happened. 


II 
SCHOOL AND FACTORY YEARS 


HEN I was about eight years old Father 
\ ‘ | went to be a clerk in his brother’s store 
about seven miles from Washington; 
so for four years we had a taste of country life. 
If I had to choose between the two, I would rather 
give my small children four years of country life 
than give them four years of college later on. Im- 
pulses and influences took root in those four years 
that have been as sheltering vines, as flowering 
plants, and as fruitful trees, in the years that have 
followed. Days there were out-of-doors, walks 
through fields bespangled with daisies and butter- 
cups, through woods fragrant with arbutus hiding 
Spring’s loveliness under Winter’s dead leaves, 
while mating birds sang love-songs as they built 
nests and brooded their eggs. The nights were 
cozy, with the family circle gathered around a 
lamp on the table and pets sleeping at our feet. 
So far as income was concerned we had no more 
money than we had possessed when in the city, but 
we had all the wealth of out-of-doors, so we did not 
feel poor. 
Not only does the family circle seem closer and 


cozier in a country home, but in a rural community 
21 


22 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


the spirit of neighbourliness seems warmer and 
stronger than it is possible for community feeling 
to be in a town or city where neighbours know little 
of one another and have many diverse interests 
away from home and neighbourhood. Much has 
been written of the narrowness of country life and 
of the gossiping propensities of country folk, so 
that these two terms pass unchallenged. “ Nar- 
rowness,” where by day the eye follows long 
stretches of road through green fields and by 
rugged streams until lost amongst hills and great 
trees that stretch their finger tips to touch heaven’s 
blue! A sweep of the eye from those upstretched 
trees, draws a great circle joining heaven and earth 
at its circumference, while all the land is aquiver 
with living, growing plants nodding and bowing in 
friendliness while busy creatures work in their 
shade or wing their way joyously to heights beyond 
reach of the tallest tree. By night the darkness, 
undimmed by glaring artificial lights, draws the 
gaze above where God’s glory blazes in stars un- 
veiled by smoke. Change the green of summer to 
the rioting colours of autumn or the quiet, glisten- 
ing white of winter and you have new characters, 
new costumes, on the same matchless stage stirring 
the soul and whetting the mind until they are rest- 
less as with growing-pains. 

In the dozen or score of houses nestling under 
trees, by brooks or on hilltops, live men, women 
and children whose lives are rich in every great 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 23 


human experience. Here babies come, “ trailing 
clouds of glory” that all are unconsciously con- 
scious of; they grow into childhood with its play 
and school, into manhood and maidenhood with its 
beauty, work and love. Marriage-bells ring and 
new homes are built; sickness and sorrow come 
with their chastening power; tragedy creeps in and 
death enters its claim. In a country community 
these things are not material for newspaper re- 
ports; they do not occur daily, and so make little 
impress. But through the years they happen to 
flesh-and-blood people whose Christian names are 
spoken in every household, whose traits, ambi- 
tions, abilities, failures, successes, are fairly esti- 
mated by their neighbours. The “ gossip ” of the 
countryside is usually natural curiosity sympa- 
thetically busy, not with strangers or acquain- 
tances, but with friends and well-known neigh- 
bours. But out of this so-called “ narrowness ” 
and gossip have come poets to sing songs of nature, 
home, and love, with such constraining sweetness 
that all the world sings with them; and from coun- 
try homes have come pioneer souls of vision and 
daring to lighten dark continents and to open 
doors of freedom for those carried from thence into 
slavery. 

A year ago Mother, Bertha and I drove out to 
Landover and walked over the old landmarks. We 
went to the little brown house below the station 
where Mother had sought to augment her income 


24 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


by boarding four of the men working on the Chesa- 
peake Railroad, and receiving for her labour worth- 
less stock in the liquidated company—scrip for two 
hundred dollars that would not reduce her grocery 
bill by a dollar. A brook running alongside the 
road in front of the brown house, bound Miss Joe’s 
apple orchard where grew the most wonderful rus- 
set apples that ever gave a child pain in the 
stomach. Mother did not whip her children often, 
but once, when she wanted to administer needed 
chastisement to me, I ran around the big flower 
bed in the side yard. As my fleet little mother 
was gaining upon me, I scampered down the ter- 
race, across the road, right in and through the 
“branch ” where my mother halted while I sought 
the refuge of Miss Joe’s friendly tree and the com- 
fort of her apples. At dusk I went sheepishly 
home and was sent to bed. I was wretchedly un- 
happy and ashamed of my naughtiness, but could 
not frame a confession with my tongue. So scrib- 
bled a note which ran: “‘ Dear Mamma, I love you 
and am sorry I am so bad.”’ The crumpled paper 
was hid under my pillow until Mother came up- 
stairs to fix me for the night, when I tied it to one 
of her apron strings. 

There was no Protestant church or Sunday 
school in Landover when we first moved there. 
Some of the mothers decided to build a Union 
church. While the church was building the Sun- 
day school, preaching services and prayer meeting 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 25 


were held in our home. Here the preachers were 
often entertained Tuesday and Sunday evenings, 
and here, too, the ladies gave a dance and supper 
for the benefit of the new church building. On 
this occasion so many city-folk stayed all night 
that we slept in beds crosswise, with chairs pulled 
up to support the feet of the taller girls. 

Because Mother did not approve of the teacher, 
I was out of school for a year and a half in Land- 
over. I then spent a year in Philadelphia where 
I attended school. We moved to Baltimore shortly 
after I returned from Philadelphia. I entered the 
Baltimore schools about Easter and was placed in 
the seventh grade. The Baltimore children had 
been studying algebra all the year; I had never 
heard of it. I had no patience with it. I found X 
particularly exasperating and elusive. It was never 
the same thing twice in succession. Other chil- 
dren got five and ten home-problems correct every 
night while I had not the faintest idea as to how 
to proceed. Ah, Emma Lou! I can sympathize 
with you. But I retrieved myself on the Easter 
composition that we had to write in school. My 
teacher and the principal gave me a private audi- 
ence after school and bestowed high praise upon 
my composition, then declared that the child who 
wrote that paper could easily master algebra—as 
though bursting bulbs and butterflies with newly 
acquired wings had anything in common with life- 
less X! Papa could not get work as easily as 


26 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


we had supposed he could, so after about two 
weeks at school I ceased to bother about X and ac- 
companied Bertha and Maude to the factory where 
Bertha was bookkeeper and Maude operated a 
machine. 

We left home in mornings about twenty or 
twenty-five minutes after six and by steady walk- 
ing arrived at the factory just as the whistles blew 
seven. It was a large overall and shirt factory 
about half a block deep. We walked upstairs to 
the third or fourth floor. There were windows at 
front and back, but the centre of the room was 
quite dark except for lighted gas jets. A great 
engine at the back of the room revolved rods which 
ran under long tables and operated machines at 
which women bent. The operators worked piece- 
work. As one hand pulled the garment from the 
machine and dropped it on the floor to the right, 
the other hand automatically reached for another 
garment from the pile stacked on a box at the left 
of the machine. 

I was floor-girl. Going up and down the aisles 
I picked up the overalls, folded and piled them on 
a table until I had a stack that reached from my 
shoulder to the top of my head. Around this I 
stretched my little arms and carried the burden to 
the great table at the front of the room where the 
work was examined. There was no time to sit or 
rest until the noon whistle blew. Then from paper 
bags we brought out our sandwiches, fruit and 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 27 


cake. Some girls brought bottles of tea or coffee 
which they poured into tin cups with handles bound 
with cloth so they could be held over the gas jets, 
to heat their contents. From twelve to twelve- 
thirty the clock travelled at a pace designed to 
make up for the lagging of time before and after 
that period. Hardly were the contents of the 
paper sacks disposed of when the twelve-thirty 
whistles blew, the deafening din of machinery re- 
started, and work commenced again. I continued 
plodding the same round until five-thirty when 
there was a rush for four faucets at the sink where 
about a hundred girls sought to wash off the blue 
dye and change into dresses fit to wear on the 
street. My knees shook with exhaustion as I 
walked downstairs and joined the jostling crowds 
on the sidewalks,—all homeward bound. 

When we came to the corner, dismayed to see 
Bertha cross the cartracks rather than join the 
waiting crowds, I cried out to her, “Oh, Bertha! 
Aren’t we going to ride home? I’m so tired!” 
Still walking briskly, Bertha answered, “I’m 
afraid not, honey; we can’t afford it. You won’t 
feel so tired when we have been out in the air 
awhile, and have gotten away from the crowds.” 

I wanted to sit on the curb and cry. I thought I 
never could walk home. How gladly at that mo- 
ment I would have gone back to school and that 
algebraic X. Let X be the number of blocks home. 
At every crossing I counted them to keep the tears 


28 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


back and my legs moving. Carfare for the three 
of us would have been fifteen cents, three-fifths of 
my ten-hour-day’s earnings. 

The next day the program was the same and for 
many days thereafter. On Saturday I received my 
week’s wages, a dollar-and-a-half, that is, twenty- 
five cents a day, two-and-a-half cents an hour. 
After a few months I was promoted to a cording 
machine and ran cords in the fronts of men’s shirts. 
On this work (by taking all of my mistakes home 
to make right at night) I made as much as two dol- 
lars and forty cents in one week. Then I went to 
another factory to operate a button machine for 
two dollars a week. Here I broke the record by 
sewing on (as I remember it) 2,000 buttons a day! 
Occasionally rush orders necessitated our working 
overtime—sometimes until eight or nine o’clock at 
night. At such times the piece-workers were paid 
for the work done and time-workers received as 
compensation for the extra two or three hours’ 
work a box of half a dozen fried oysters with a 
piece of pickle and some crackers. This in the 
the years 1896-1899 in the city of Baltimore! 

Organized labour has made some mistakes in 
policy and control, but it is owing to its efforts that 
a labourer usually receives something like a worthy 
recompense for hire and a child of twelve does not 
have to work in factories. Had labour not organ- 
ized, the conditions of 1896 would probably still 
be maintained; employers would be living in even 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 29 


more palatial homes and labourers be living in the 
wretched abodes that to this day stand in mute 
accusation along the railroad tracks in the mining 
sections of West Virginia, marring the beauty of 
the fair hills of that state. 

One morning on my way to work, I saw a large 
billboard announcing that Maude Adams was play- 
ing at a local theater. Now the previous week I 
had read many beautiful things concerning Miss 
Adams’ private life and professional career. As a 
little girl of five or six, I had sat with Bertha and 
one of her girl-friends in the peanut gallery to see 
“A Farmer’s Daughter,’ and when I was but 
twelve, a neighbour in Philadelphia had taken me 
to see “ Faust.” Dozens of times since that day I 
had acted some of those scenes out before admiring 
youngsters. An old longing to make vast audi- 
ences laugh and cry at my will, was revived with 
all the vitality of hibernated hope. I could not 
afford the price of a ticket to see Maude Adams, 
so I wrote the celebrity a letter telling her that I 
was undecided whether to be a writer or an actress, 
that my people did not want me to go on the stage 
but that I thought I would do it anyway, only I 
did not know how to go about it, so was hoping 
that she would send me instructions for which I 
enclosed a stamp. This was the method followed 
to secure instructions concerning anything that was 
advertised in a Fireside Companion that used to 
come to our house in Landover. 


30 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


All that week Bertha and Maude walked home 
far too slowly to suit me, so eager was I for Maude 
Adams’ letter that I confidently expected each 
night. But the answer never came and my two 
postage stamps and the paper and envelope that I 
had bought at a notion store, were wasted. But 
my desire did not die easily. I watched the want 
ads, and the summer that I was fifteen I saw that 
two sixteen-year-old girls were wanted to help out 
in a cast. They were to apply at a certain ter- 
race. I thought that I knew where this was and 
set out for it in high glee, mentally reading news- 
paper accounts of Ella Marie Holmes’ beautiful 
home life, her deeds of charity, and the splendour 
of her professional career. I clipped some of the 
most glowing recitals to send to Maude Adams 
without an enclosed stamp. I hunted for that ter- 
race until dark, but found it not and then went sor- 
rowfully home. 

While working in factories I never went out in 
the evening. If there were no work to rip I used 
to read my sister Nettie’s books from the Enoch 
Pratt Library. After Father got work and our 
finances were more promising, I had another year 
at school. One Friday afternoon my teacher read 
aloud from Hiawatha. It was hard to keep the 
tears back, I was so happy. It reminded me of 
the song of the brook at Landover and of the 
passing of the breeze in the tree-tops in the wood 
where arbutus grows. All sense of words and all 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 31 


trend of a tale were lost in the flow of words and 
their music. This was a new thing to share with 
Nettie. 

It was about this time that I became interested 
in atheism. My father and his five brothers had 
been brought up according to the strictest sect of 
Scotch Presbyterianism. On weekdays they were 
driven to school'in a carriage, but on Sunday they 
had to walk to church and Sunday school. They 
were not allowed to whistle or sing. The Bible and 
Sunday-school paper were the only legitimate Sab- 
bath literature. I judge that the father’s skilfully 
hidden love found expression in rules of conduct 
and economy of expenditure. The mother was lov- 
ing and generous as she dared to be. The boys 
grew up with nothing but bitterness for their 
father’s religion, and four of them lived to good old 
age and were buried without giving recognition at 
all during their later years to religion. When I 
was a girl my father was still an atheist and I was 
trying to be one, too. 

From the library I got Robert Ingersoll’s works 
and kindred books and read them. I also read 
much of the Hebrews and thought they must have 
known much more about the Christ they rejected, 
than the Gentiles who accepted Him could pos- 
sibly know. 

My sister Nettie was my only close friend, and 
I did not share my doubts and rebellion with her. 
For to my little sister, faith in God as always 


32 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


present, always wise and loving in His guidance, 
gifts and denials, was as natural and as sustaining 
as nursing is toa babe. I hope not many children 
of fifteen are doomed to silent waging of battles 
as desperate as I fought when at that age. I took 
nothing for granted, accepted nothing on faith, 
challenged everything, doubted everything and 
questioned everything, from immortality to the 
presence of sin, sorrow and weariness. And all 
this mental warfare was silently waged with no one 
to know or help. I was wretchedly unhappy and 
longed to go alone to some woods where, with no 
one to see or know, I might seek God if haply I 
might find Him. 

Mother compelled me to attend afternoon Sun- 
day school with my sisters. My teacher was a 
good, kind woman, but she was not on very 
familiar terms with God. She read us what was 
written in her quarterly for she had nothing better 
written in her head and heart. I promised one 
of the girls with whom I worked, to visit her Sun- 
day school one morning and here I found a teacher 
who was different. She possessed a quality that 
the other teacher lacked. She and God were good 
friends; she stayed close by Him so that He could 
send her on errands. I think that she had known 
sorrow and had wrested sweetness and sympathy 
from it. Some of my questions she answered with- 
out my having to ask them. 

For a month or more that inward battle went 


SCHOOL AND FACTORY DAYS 33 


on with renewed fury, but still no outward sign. 
My new Sunday-school teacher asked me to attend 
an evening evangelistic service at her church. I 
went alone. A white-haired saint stood in front 
of a vast concourse of us and spoke of God our 
Father, and of our Brother, Christ the Saviour. 
The light on the old man’s face, the earnestness of 
his speech, his confidence in God and his yearning 
love for his fellows, made his simple message 
eloquent. After the benediction I stole out and 
walked home along the wide, parked street of 
Eutaw Place. Away from the church the streets 
were deserted. There was no moon. The stars 
were close and friendly. To them I lifted my face 
and voice: ‘Oh, God!” I cried, “I don’t know 
who you are or what you are; I don’t know where 
you are nor how to come to you, but I need you. 
I’m making a bungle of things and I’m so unhappy. 
Take charge of me, dear God.” The stars and I 
have been in league ever since that night. Quietly 
I finished my walk home. As a wee child losing 
sight of its mother in a crowd, runs hither and yon, 
becoming ever more terrified and fearful, then 
catching sight of the familiar face, finds shelter in 
protecting arms and after one or two gulping 
breaths, nestles a tear-stained face in the haven of 
mother’s breast—thus that night was I comforted 
by God. 

In the dark and quiet of my room I definitely 
committed my way to Him, and as I review the 


34 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


twenty-four years that have since passed, I find 
that all the days of all the years testify marvel- 
ously to His direction of my paths. Not yet do 
I understand the reason for some of the detours, 
the hard, rugged climbing, the foggy stretches, the 
lonely ways. But all that I do understand proves 
irresistibly and conclusively that the journey was 
wisely planned, is being personally conducted and 
leads to a desirable end. And so I do not find it 
difficult to trust, concerning those stretches that 
have been and are as yet obscure. 

The next morning I got up a little earlier, copied 
a Bible verse on a slip of paper and memorized it 
on my way to work. But I told no one of my ex- 
perience, for a fortnight. Then I asked for bap- 
tism in my own church, and after doing this went 
home and told the folk that I had been converted. 
An aunt who was living with us, laughingly warned 
me that my hair was still red. The next morning 
we began saying grace before meals. 


Ill 
GETTING READY 


FTER joining the Church I was given a 
A piece to recite on Children’s Day. It was 
about millions in China dying unsaved. 
I thought it was sad and tried to make it appear 
so to others, but I had no idea whether these mil- 
lions were dying unsaved from fire, pestilence, or 
sword. Never, to my knowledge, had I heard of 
missions, either home or foreign. 

Shortly after my sixteenth birthday we moved 
back to Washington, where, for two years, I 
worked in a cousin’s store. Later I cashiered in 
a grocery store and clerked in a drug store, doub- 
ling my salary and leisure and finding time to read. 
One Sunday when I was eighteen, Dr. Willing- 
ham of Richmond preached the first foreign mis- 
sion sermon I ever heard. Immediately I decided 
to become a foreign missionary and was puzzled 
to know why all the young people who had heard 
the address had not made similar decisions. Again 
I was ignorant as to how to enter upon my chosen 
career. Miss Appler, my Sunday-school teacher 
at that time, gave me the address of our foreign 
mission society in Boston. I wrote them, expect- 
ing that in two weeks or so, I would be on my way 


to Africa. The letter from Boston stated that I 
35 


36 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


must have the equivalent of a High School educa- 
tion and some special training in addition, and that 
twenty-five was the minimum age for entering for- 
eign mission service. This time Ignorance stood 
by Youth barring the gate to Paradise. A High 
School education! And I had been in school but 
five-and-a-half years all told! It would take me 
until I was twenty-five to do what was required for 
preparation. 

I began at once by getting books from the library 
and by reading Nettie’s school books. And I 
began to save. I wore blue gingham shirt-waists 
—even on Sunday. I walked to and from work, 
except when on night duty. In summer, when I 
hankered for an ice-cream soda, I would walk up’ 
to a drug-store window, stop a few minutes to look 
at the soaps, perfumes, brushes, etc., displayed 
there, then walk away wiping my lips and making 
believe that I had been inside and had a soda. 
The home-folk, laughing indulgently, remarked that 
this was a new kind of fever and would probably 
spend its course just as the stage-fever had done. 
Handed-on clothes had always helped out with my 
wardrobe, so most of my spending money changed 
hands over second-hand bookstalls. When I heard 
my first missionary sermon, I was the proud and 
devoted possessor of about seventy-five books. I 
supposed that when I should sail away as a mis- 
sionary, I could take only such possessions as 
might be carried in a suitcase or trunk, and so 


GETTING READY 37 


thought there would be no room for books. In 
proof of the earnestness of my intentions, I dis- 
tributed my books amongst my friends, keeping for 
myself only Watson’s Life of The Master. This 
violent burning of bridges convinced the family 
that the new fever was a serious attack. 

A friend told me about Northfield Seminary and 
I learned that I could earn a one-term scholarship 
by securing one hundred subscriptions to The 
Record of Christian Work. I straightway pro- 
ceeded to do this. While canvassing for subscrip- 
tions I learned lessons that are on no school cur- 
riculum—lessons in human nature. Greater than 
the surprise of learning how little many people of 
comfortable circumstances feel that they can af- 
ford, apart from personal and household adorn- 
ment, was my surprise to find how ready the poor 
often are to make an expenditure calculated to 
help some one else. Possibly they have formed the 
habit of doing without things; certainly they have 
learned the joy of sharing what one has. One of 
my most generous friends was my Sunday-school 
teacher. She herself had wanted to be a foreign 
missionary but her health prevented. After spend- 
ing the trying summer days in an office, she de- 
voted four nights a week through the hot summer 
months and her rare teaching ability to helping me 
with my books. Because of this loving service I 
was able to pass off most of my preparatory work 


38 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


when I entered Northfield Seminary, September, 
1905. 

The following four years at Northfield gave me 
much more than gleanings from books. There I 
had my first view of mountains, and needed no 
other testimony that the blood which nourished me 
had once coursed through the veins of men and 
women who stopped at their work to lift up their 
eyes unto the hills with all a highlander’s love of 
lofty places. On the first Sunday afternoon at 
Northfield one of the teachers sat on the carpet of 
brown needles under the Cathedral Pines and read 
to us Dr. Van Dyke’s story of “‘ The Other Wise 
Man.” Before the reading was over my arms had 
to shield a wet face buried in the needles. This 
was the first of many cherished experiences out of 
doors. There were tramps in snowstorms, long 
walks on frosty mornings when trees, bushes and 
houses glistened dazzlingly with jewelled icicles, 
when the ground was hid with sparkling gems; 
then hunts for the first arbutus and violets; Bird 
Day, when we tramped the hills, beautiful in fresh 
greens and spring blossoms and pungent with the 
smell of new life; Apple Blossom Sunday, when 
trees of pink posies quivered and bowed in the 
orchards, like little children in new spring dresses 
speaking pieces from a platform; Mountain Day, 
when frost had opened chestnut burrs and spilled 
the glossy brown nuts on the brilliant foliage with 
which the trees were having a quilting party against 


GETTING READY 39 


winter’s cold. And there were close daily contacts 
with women of noble spirit, who shared with hun- 
dreds of eager girls the fine fruits of years of 
scholarship, culture and experience. 

After the first semester: my Sunday school paid 
a hundred dollars a year for my board and tuition. 
During the Christmas vacation I hired a hall in 
Washington and gave an evening of readings that 
usually netted sufficient to pay my carfare for the 
vacation and a surplus that took care of fees, 
books, clothes, etc. In my senior year expenses 
were heavy, but I came out a little ahead by giving 
readings in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, 
during the Easter recess, and by winning first prize 
in the Temperance prize-speaking contest. 

Several times while at Northfield I was hard 
pressed for funds, but every need was wonderfully 
supplied, although I never spoke or wrote to any- 
one about my need of money. At noon one Mon- 
day in my Junior year, I was without a cent. That 
afternoon I had to pay a fifty-cent class fee and 
have a dollar and a quarter for a French book. 
Going to my room I found my room-mate out. 
Locking the door, I knelt by my bed, told God of 
my need and reminded Him that there was no one 
else to whom I could look for support. While I 
was still kneeling someone knocked at the door. 
It was the girl delivering the noon mail. She 
handed me a letter bearing the Washington post- 
mark. Folded within a blank piece of paper was 


40 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


a five-dollar bill. I do not know whom He used, 
but I know that my Father sent me that money. 
It had been mailed in Washington before I knew 
that I would need it. ‘‘ Before they call I will an- 
swer; and while they are yet speaking I will hear.” 
I needed only a dollar and seventy-five cents, but 
received more than twice that amount. This is 
God’s “good measure, pressed down, and shaken 
together, and running over.’’ On another occasion 
I had written my home letter but had no stamp 
nor a cent with which to buy one. The same day 
I had a letter from my sister Maude enclosing six 
two-cent stamps, accompanied by a word saying 
that she had them in her desk and thought that I 
could use them. 

“Childish, inconceivably childish!” you may say, 
to suppose that the Creator and Sustainer of the 
Universe Who stores forests of coal and rivers 
of oil in the bowels of the earth, crowns Everest 
with everlasting snow, and directs worlds in their 
courses,—that this Creator and Sustainer takes 
account of a little factory girl’s need of a two- 
cent postage stamp! Frankly I acknowledge 
such personal care of the Creator for one of His 
small creatures to be beyond the grasp of my 
understanding, too, but it is in the realm of my 
experience. And in my religion I am as ready to 
be taught by forty years of life’s experiences, as 
in the study of a science I am open to laboratory 
experiments and demonstrations to prove theories 


GETTING READY 41 


of chemistry, physics, astronomy and botany, that 
as bare statements stagger my understanding. 

Nor do these experiences of a personal God as 
a Father wisely, lovingly, intimately, active in all 
that conerns His children, rest only on my two- 
score years of experience: That is but a small rock 
in a mighty structure that has been millenniums in 
construction and on which shepherds, farmers, 
fishermen, housewives, generals, kings, poets and 
philosophers have wrought, testifying from the 
most varied experiences of their widely different 
stations in life, that God has dealt with them “ as 
an eagle stirreth up her nest,” fluttering over her 
young, spreading abroad her wings, taking them, 
bearing them on her wings; as a Shepherd feeding 
His flock in green pastures and by still waters, 
gathering the lambs in His arms, carrying them in 
His bosom and having thought for the mother 
sheep who find the way hard because of their con- 
cern for their young; as a Guide directing to the 
right hand and the left, arranging schedule, mak- 
ing record of the mileage, in mercy preventing, 
bringing safely to a desired haven and a good land; 
as a Lover loving with an everlasting love that 
many waters cannot quench, neither can the floods 
drown, drawing to Himself with bands of love, with 
love’s insistence ever wooing to higher things; as 
a Father bearing His son in His mind and heart, 
taking him by his arm to teach him to take his 
first steps, correcting, instructing, pitying, afflicted 


42 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


in all His children’s afflictions, running with royal 
welcome to greet a wayward son as he turns 
towards the Father’s house; as a mother comfort- 
ing a wounded spirit and bleeding heart. But even 
this array of word pictures did not suffice David, 
the shepherd-king-poet, the father of steadfast love 
for a rebellious son, as he reviewed God’s care for 
him in all his chequered career; so faithful and 
rich in loving-kindness had he found God to be, 
that he said he would trust Him to take him up 
even in the inconceivable possibility of his father 
and mother forsaking him. 

The coming of my friends prove that God 
counted their steps and mine and directed us to 
our meeting. Marvelously has their coming been 
timed and placed, bringing particular gifts to meet 
peculiar needs: a teacher when the mind needed 
direction, a physician when the body needed care, 
a strong arm when there was need to lift a load 
beyond my physical strength, a warm and under- 
standing heart waiting at the end of every hard 
lonely passage, and most of the way there was my 
sister Nettie to cool my hot temper with her calm, 
to check my rash impulses with her sanity, to love 
me though knowing all my unloveliness, and to be- 
lieve in me when for others I had no promise. 
These friends could no more have chanced to come 
in the fullness of time and at the appointed place 
of need, than Orion happens every year to wander 
across our winter skies; or than our American 


GETTING READY 43 


world-fliers chance to find new equipment and sup- 
plies waiting them at stated landing places. Since 
God has thought for the protection of a fern frond 
as He calls it from under the soil into the sunlight, 
I can believe that He is mindful of a factory girl’s 
need of a two-cent stamp; since He times the stars 
along courses He has mapped out for them, is it 
impossible that our times are in His hands or that 
our steps are ordered by Him? 


After graduating from Northfield I had a year 
at home in Washington attending normal school 
and substituting in the graded schools. This was 
of all years the one when I was most needed at 
home as my sister Maude was ill and my mother 
had persuaded her husband to let her come home 
to be nursed. 

In September, 1910, I started in for a year’s 
work at Newton Centre Theological Seminary. 
When [I had been in the school but a month I was 
asked if I would accompany a bride and groom to 
Assam. I did not know where Assam was, but 
replied that I would go. There were but ten days 
in which to shop, dress-make and pack. I have 
always been glad that the time for preparation was 
so short, that there was no time to be dismal and 
no time for farewell parties. 

My heart’s desire was gratified when the steam- 
ship Winifredian pulled away from her dock in 
Boston, November 3, 1910. Just before the ap- 


4A SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


pointed hour for sailing we discovered that none 
of my baggage was aboard! The transfer com- 
pany had delivered it at the wrong dock. I worea 
coat-suit and had a nightbag with a “ nightie,” 
toothbrush and paste, soap-box and handkerchiefs. 
Besides the bride and groom there were three other 
passengers: an invalid who never left her cabin, 
a dear Scotch spinster, and an interesting old 
Irish lady whose morning and night refreshment 
fumes escaped from her cabin to mine and were 
different from the jube-jubes of which her breath 
smelled when she came on deck. The invalid had 
a beautiful fur-lined coat which she loaned me; 
the Scotch lady contributed a blue, cotton blouse; 
and the bride and groom graciously put their 
steamer chairs close together so that one steamer 
rug sufficed for them, in order to give me the use 
of their second rug. Fog-horns were busy much 
of the way, and we were nine days crossing. I 
went to bed in the afternoons so that the stew- 
ardess could launder some things for me and dry 
them in the engine-room. My trunk was located 
and forwarded on a White Star liner and was wait- 
ing for me in Liverpool, when we arrived. 

After the Scotch passenger had shown me Liver- 
pool there was still a week before we sailed for 
India. The bride and groom decided to remain in 
Liverpool, so I went down to London by myself. 
I arrived in the city after dark. I did not know 
anyone in London and was so unfamiliar with Eng- 


GETTING READY 45 


lish currency that twice I had to resort to offering 
amazed clerks a palmful of miscellaneous coins 
from which they culled the required cash. The 
telephone directory showed no Y. W. C. A. hotel. 
I called up the Association headquarters to en- 
quire about accommodations and was told that 
they made no provision for transients, but had a 
home for working girls. Surely I belonged to that 
class, but had difficulty in persuading the lady in 
charge to admit me, since I was not seeking work 
in London. The girls were going down to dinner 
when I arrived. We passed in single file down- 
stairs to the basement. In cafeteria style we 
helped ourselves from stacks of heavy white plates 
and cups and saucers. The cups were filled with 
hot cocoa from a big white enamel pitcher, and two 
steaming fat sausages and a boiled potato were put 
on each of our plates as we passed to our places on 
wooden benches running either side of two long 
plank-tables. On round, wooden bread-boards 
down the center of the table loaves of bread were 
placed from which we cut slices as we wished them. 

After dinner we went to our cubicles. A large 
room with a narrow passage through the center 
had the two sides partitioned into little narrow cur- 
tained spaces furnished with a single cot, a wash- 
stand and a little chair. After breakfast down in 
the basement daily I sallied forth to the British Mu- 
seum, the art galleries, the Tower, St. Paul’s, and 
Westminster Abbey, where Livingstone’s floor-slab 


46 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


stirred me as none of the monuments of the other 
departed great did. I experienced two thrills in 
the English metropolis. One was a real London 
fog, when all the shops were lighted at ten A. M. 
as at night, and the buses were as sparks in 
dense smoke; the other thrill was encountered 
while on my way to Westminster when I was 
swallowed up in a mob gathered to support 
a suffragette demonstration. Women dodged 
the big policemen guarding the entrances, and 
one of their number leaped over an iron grill. 
Mounted officers drove the crowd back to the curb, 
while on the pavement other officers prodded their 
billies into the backs of the women and ordered 
them along. Schoolboys in Eton suits watched 
the excitement from the top of an iron fence. I 
wanted to go on and get out of it but there was 
no opening through which to worm my way. Am- 
bulances and patrol-wagons were clanging gongs as 
they rushed the women to jail. Finally I escaped 
into the quiet of Westminster, amazed that the 
calm, controlled women of England could ever be 
wrought up to such a militant frenzy. 

I returned to Liverpool and sailed for Calcutta 
on the S.S. City of York, from whence we jour- 
neyed by rail to Gauhati, Assam, at which place 
we arrived on Christmas Eve, 1910. 


IV 
ASSAM — THE WETTEST LAND ON EARTH 


SSAM is the most northeastern province 
A of British India. It is wedged between 
Burma on the south and east, and Bengal 
on the west. It is a huge tea-garden of rare beauty 
in the front yard of Tibet and Bhutan. It is one 
of the wettest places in the world. “ Wet,” but 
not in a sense opposite to that in which America 
is supposed to be dry just now. More rain falls 
upon the soil of Assam than is recorded for any 
other section of the earth’s surface. The average 
annual rainfall is from ninety-three to one hundred 
and twenty-four inches, but in Cherrapunji the 
average annual fall is four hundred and fifty-eight 
inches with eight hundred and five actually re- 
corded in one year! This abundant rainfall and 
melting snows from the Himalayan mountains feed 
a network of rivers spread out like a spider’s web 
over the country, with the result that Assam has 
more river-bed per square mile than any other part 
of the earth’s surface. 

These rivers nibble their way through fields of 
rice and sing seawards along rocky mountain-beds 
fringed with old, gnarled trees bending to see the 
reflected beauty of trunk and outstretched arms, 
spilling trailing vines, hanging mosses, ferns and 

47 


48 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


orchids of brown, yellow, pink, lavender and 
waxen-white with heart of gold. The jungle that 
carpets low places and hills with bewitchingly ver- 
dant beauty affords covert for abundant wild- 
animal life. Here great herds of wild elephants, 
tigers, leopards, bears, water-buffaloes, deer, chat- 
tering monkeys, the great python, small deadly 
krite and hooded king-cobra are at home. 

In little, brown cottages, usually built with floor 
and walls of mud and roof of thatch, nestling under 
clumps of plumed bamboos, in groves of palm and 
mango trees, live nearly eight million men, women 
and children. In complexion they range from the 
African brown of the coolie class to the dark 
Italian tan of the Zenana women and the people of 
the hills. In religion nearly half of Assam’s mil- 
lions are Hindus; about one-fifth are Moham- 
medans and a sixth are animists. The latter are 
principally Tibeto-Chinese-Burman tribes living in 
the hills. The Hindus, being Aryans, have the 
features of the white race; the animists or hill- 
people have the almond eyes, straight hair and flat 
noses of the yellow race. 

When I first read the life of David Livingstone, 
that part of the narrative which drove me to my 
room to hide my face in a pillow, was not the 
chapters dealing with Livingstone’s exploration of 
rivers and discovery of lakes, but that part of the 
story which tells of Livingstone’s exploration of a 
black man’s heart and his discovery that under 


THE WETTEST LAND 49 


skin of black as under the skin of white, beats a 
heart that ‘“ seeking for God, lonely and longing 
runs.” After having lived a dozen years in Assam, 
meeting men, women and children in their homes, 
in schools, bazaars and railroads; after having 
walked with them side by side along highways 
where white stones check off the miles, or joined 
their single file along narrow trenches in flooded 
rice fields where villages counted distance, and 
through winding jungle paths where rivers crossed 
and to be crossed, told how much of the journey 
was yet to be done; after having sat in their court- 
yards on mats of skin or bamboo and eaten rice 
and curry from a banana leaf, with my fingers; 
after having poured tea in china cups for them as 
they squatted on the floor of my home,—TI found 
that one needs go very lightly indeed, but very lov- 
ingly and patiently, to find under skin of brown 
and tan, as under skin of white and black, a heart 
that “ seeking for God, lonely and longing runs.” 
On the night of my arrival in Gauhati the Indian 
Christians gave a reception. The path to the little 
church was banked on both sides with tall date- 
palm fronds behind which glimmered rows of little 
earthen lipped saucers of oil feeding wicks of 
twisted rag. In the little building used as school- 
house and church, mine was the fifth adult white 
face among faces of tan and brown. They spoke 
a language unintelligible to me. A hymn was an- 
nounced and I was handed a hymnal printed in 


50 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


strange characters. Suddenly and keenly I realized 
that here I was a stranger and foreigner. Then 
the brown people arose to sing, “ Joy to the 
World,” “Room in My Heart for Thee,” “ What 
a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Not a word could 
I understand, but I knew the songs by their famil- 
iar tunes, and by the “ light that never was on land 
or sea’ that beautified those brown faces. I knew 
that, after all, I was not a stranger and a foreigner, 
but a fellow-citizen with these saints who in an un- 
known tongue spoke of experiences common to all 
the household of God. That night heart of brown 
woman and heart of white woman was one in cry- 
ing “‘ Abba, Father,” and in looking up to God in 
praise and love for a common Saviour. 

Almost always the first year or two of a foreign 
missionary’s life is a time of trial and disappoint- 
ment. Generally loss of weight and a depression 
in spirits are accounted for on the score of acclima- 
tion. It was so in my case. I did have some 
malaria, but there were other things that kept me 
awake long hours during the night and made it 
difficult for me to swallow food. Naked heathen- 
ism at so close range was unspeakably horrid and 
repulsive, and there was no escape from it. Every 
time I had to pass through the bazaar, I saw 
sights that haunted me and kept sleep away at 
night. In my language-lessons and study of the 
history and customs of the people, I met repulsive 
statements that I was not willing at first to accept 





SCHOOL GIRLS WEARING THEIR JOPI OR 
UMBRELLA 





THE WETTEST LAND 51 


as fact. In all of India there was not a soul that 
I had ever seen or known before coming to the 
country,—no one with whom to talk things over. 

The only place for laughter and light breathing 
was in the Tuttle family circle, where Lucile and 
Stephen in the charm of their childhood helped 
one to forget. Three months after my arrival the 
children went to Darjeeling with their mother to 
attend school in the cool of the hills. 

When I had been a little more than a month in 
Assam, I adopted three little brown girls. This 
helped some, although the manner of their com- 
ing was another horror. Proba and Leci were sis- 
ters, five and seven years old. Their mother was 
a Christian; their father ate hemp, which in its 
effect is similar to opium. The mother died and 
the father was negotiating to sell these two little 
girls, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, to a 
Mohammedan for ten rupees (about three dollars 
and thirty-five cents). The Mohammedan would 
have kept the girls as house-servants until they 
were about thirteen years of age when he would 
have sold them to some fellow-Mohammedan for 
wives, receiving forty or even sixty rupees apiece 
for them. Proba is now married to a Christian 
and has two children. Leci is completing her train- 
ing as a nurse, ready to serve in our first woman’s 
hospital, to be opened in Gauhati this winter. 

During that first year I took in a little girl about 
two weeks old. She had been found newly born, 


52 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


in the bazaar, by sweepers early one morning. Had 
the little waif been a boy some sonless sire would 
surely have adopted her as his own. In Gauhati, a 
town of about 16,000 inhabitants, there is no or- 
phanage, no Hindu or Mohammedan hospital for 
humans; nor do those who profess these two relig- 
ions support the Government hospital except by 
providing patients. Yet there is a hospital for 
aged, injured and sick cattle, for cows are sacred 
to Hindus. So this little discarded mite of hu- 
manity was taken to the thana (police station). 
The baby insisted upon living, yet it could not be 
kept at the station. The only door open for this 
wee unwanted girlie was down with the women of 
shame, and there the policemen took her. After 
ten days or so the superintendent of police wrote 
me about the baby and asked if I could take her. 
At ten o’clock the next morning a policeman came 
with three prostitutes, one of whom produced 
the baby from the folds of her drapery. The child 
was asleep when I took her. One look at the poor 
mite made my eyes close to blot out the sight. She 
was dressed in three cords on which charms were 
strung at her waist and wrists. It was the hot 
season before the break of the monsoon,—that 
hottest part of the year. I think no one had 
cleansed the baby even in mustard oil, from the 
hour it was born. Warm oil applied most tenderly 
with absorbent cotton left raw, red skin where the 
accumulated filth had been. The baby slept 


THE WETTEST LAND 53 


soundly after her bath as I wrapped her in a clean 
white swaddling cloth. Five o’clock that afternoon 
she had not yet wakened, so I called an old Bible 
woman and asked her what was the matter. She 
explained that probably before the policeman went 
for the baby, the women had given her opium so 
as not to be bothered with her crying. One of our 
Christian women who yearned for children but had 
never known motherhood, later took the baby for 
her very own and poured a wealth of love upon it 
the one short year of its life. 

Native Christians are often another source of 
disappointment to the new missionary. In mission 
literature and addresses one hears usually of ex- 
ceptional native Christians—it may be that I 
would better say “consecrated” native Chris- 
tians. Rather foolishly, and yet rather naturally, 
one deducts that on foreign mission fields there 
are no weak or wavering Christians—none to repre- 
sent Judas, or Ananias, but all of the type of John 
or Paul or James. But human nature is much the 
same all the world over, not only in its yearning 
for fellowship with God, but also in its propensity 
to sin and failure. In Assam, as in America, I 
found Christians of three classes: good, bad, and 
indifferent. There, as at home, are to be found 
those to whom religion is but a profession. They 
make this profession as a fee for which they re- 
ceive Christian marriage, baptism for their young, 


54 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


and Christian burial—not bad returns for the in- 
vestment made. 

During my first year in Assam one of our lead- 
ing educated Christians, the husband of a good 
wife and father of two children, betrayed the six- 
teen-year-old motherless daughter of the pastor, 
while she was looking after four younger children 
during her father’s absence on an evangelistic tour. 
Other similar cases occurred during those first 
years. This is the wolf ever at the door of the 
Indian Christian Church. And ever in his wake 
is confession with bitter tears, and severance from 
the body of believers until a new walk in life proves 
a departure from the old sin. For there is this 
difference between Christians who live immorally 
and their Hindu and Mohammedan neighbours 
who do the same thing: For the Christian it is a 
violation of his religious precepts and places the 
offender outside the membership of the Christian 
Church at least temporarily; whereas for Hindu, 
Mohammedan and animist, immorality imposes no 
religious penalty. 

In Assam, as in America, I found, also, Chris- 
tians who have literally ‘“ suffered the loss of all 
things and do count them but refuse that they may 
win Christ.” Listen to the story of Mrinaram, 
father of Bhuri. Mrinaram was his father’s oldest 
son. The father was the headman of his village. 
For centuries the oldest son of this house had been 
the village leader. And in his turn, Mrinaram 


THE WETTEST LAND 55 


would succeed his father as headman of the village. 
The village lay on the north bank of the Brahma- 
putra River not very far from Gauhati. In order 
that Mrinaram might be well prepared for his du- 
ties, his father sent him to Gauhati to attend high 
school. 

While at high school Mrinaram, one evening in 
the bazaar, heard of Jesus Christ. He called at 
the mission bungalow to learn more of Jesus. He 
found Christ very winsome and almost he was per- 
suaded to become a Christian, but hesitated be- 
cause the price he must pay was heavy. Later he 
went to Calcutta to attend the University. While 
there he was baptized. Such news travels fast 
even in the jungle, “for a bird of the air shall 
carry the voice and that which hath wings shall 
tell the matter.” Mrinaram’s old father and 
mother sent for their son. They plead with him to 
renounce his new faith, undergo the ceremony of 
being reinstated into caste and let all things be as 
they had been. They reminded him that if he 
persisted in the course he had chosen he might not 
put his shoulder to a burden borne by his old 
caste-fellows; nor could he drink from the village 
well, or again eat with his father, or with any of 
his family or under any caste-roof; neither would 
he be allowed to settle in the village. His younger 
brother would succeed to his father’s place and 
patrimony. If Mrinaram persisted in being a 


56 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Christian, he would be dead to Hinduism, dead to 
his village, dead to his home. 

Mrinaram’s first marriage ceremony with a little 
girl in the village had been performed. His wife 
had remained in her father’s house expecting the 
second ceremony to be performed when she was 
about thirteen, when she would go to her hus- 
band’s home. When her young husband became 
a Christian and dead to Hinduism, this little girl 
automatically became a widow, although she had 
never lived with her husband. After Mrinaram 
was adamant to all entreaties to renounce Christ, 
it was arranged that he might have his wife, hop- 
ing that she would win him back to caste. In- 
stead, the young husband won his girl-bride for 
Christ. As Christians the two young people had 
no place in their old community so they went out 
not knowing whither they went. Although the 
torn hearts of their parents plead for them and suf- 
fered with them, they could not lighten the sen- 
tence Hinduism imposed upon their children. All 
that they had known and hoped for, this young 
couple, a girl of thirteen and a boy of about eigh- 
teen, forsook for Christ’s sake, ‘‘ esteeming the re- 
proach for Christ greater riches than the treasures 
of ” Hinduism. 

One’s fellow-missionaries are sometimes a source 
of disappointment to the new missionary. When 
I left America I remembered that my hair was 
still titian and my temper of the same shade, so 


THE WETTEST LAND 57 


I did not expect the voyage across the ocean to 
perfect my saintship. But I did expect other mis- 
sionaries to be so good that continued contact with 
them would effect a decided improvement in me. 
I still believe that when the love of Christ con- 
trols our words and works and operates in our 
lives as we see it operating in the thirteenth of 
First Corinthians, no degree of incompatibility of 
temper can betray missionaries into saying and 
doing some of the unchristian things that some of 
the members of our profession have said and done. 
I have met a few missionaries whose daily lives 
have evinced but little of the graciousness and win- 
someness that marked all that Christ did and said, 
a few whose spirit and methods seem so little akin 
to Christ’s that one may but wonder what motive 
ever led them into foreign service for Christ. 
There is a nimbus to foreign work as viewed from 
a distance, a glamour of romance, the appeal of 
an opportunity to travel, to meet people of dis- 
tinction and achievement, to work at big tasks,— 
these things are all alluring and not to be dis- 
counted, but together they do not constitute ade- 
quate justification for appointment to the ranks of 
Christ’s ambassadors abroad. Amongst mission- 
aries as amongst physicians, teachers, lawyers, 
mechanics, there are misfits. While I cannot deny 
that some missionaries have failed wretchedly, I 
can testify of many more who have wrought won- 
drously in the spirit and after the manner of 


58 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Christ, and I thank my God upon every remem- 
brance of them. 

From many whose lives have been an inspira- 
tion and association with whom has been a privi- 
lege, let me tell you of one Pitt H. Moore of Now- 
gong, Assam, who walked worthy of the vocation 
wherewith he was called. When he first came to 
Assam, aS a young man of twenty-seven, Mr. 
Moore was the champion tennis-player in the 
province. His thoughts were direct and expressed 
in chaste, lucid English. He found the study of 
Assamese difficult at first and was slower than 
most missionaries to begin to use the language. 
But he afterwards became so expert in the use of 
the vernacular, that when the Assamese heard his 
voice but could not see the speaker, they supposed 
they were listening to a fellow-countryman using 
their mother-tongue. When this man had served 
in Assam for more than thirty years and had de- 
veloped statesman-like qualities that made his 
judgment of mission problems of great value, I 
was privileged to spend some months in his home. 
Not for an equal number of years’ training in any 
institution that I know of, would I exchange those 
months of fellowship with this ideal missionary. 

His home was an old bungalow that had 
been built in 1850, with trees carried from 
the jungle by elephants. Not a nail was used 
in its construction, the material being tied 
with beth (pronounced bet[h]), the outer 


THE WETTEST LAND 59 


fibre of cane. It was much the worse for wear 
and in need of alterations and repairs; one and 
two inch cracks separated some of the roughly- 
planed floor-planks; bats infested the spaces be- 
tween the thatch roof and cloth ceilings, coming 
into the house at nightfall, flying about the rooms 
and fastening themselves to the mosquito curtains 
over our beds. The bungalow was not screened. 
Dozens of little house-lizards sported about the 
whitewashed walls, now still as death, now quick 
as lightning in a dart for mosquitoes. But the old 
place was cool and comfortable; it was rich in 
associations; it was loved by the Assamese, and 
Mr. and Mrs. Moore were quite content with it, 
although they generously seconded requests from 
younger missionaries for more comfortable and 
more elaborate dwellings. In all things this fine 
missionary was most generous with others, but 
carefully guarded personal expenditure and was 
conspicuously economical in the use of mission 
funds. 

Mr. Moore’s day began early and the freshest, 
best bit of it was spent in his study. At six we 
had early breakfast. After breakfast he was busy 
with teachers and preachers from the district, the 
sick coming for medicines, the perplexed for ad- 
vice, the sorrowing for comfort. A great part of 
the morning was spent sawing, planing, and ham- 
mering on the school-building that he had designed, 
gathered the material for and was building with 


60 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


only unskilled native help, working side by side 
with coolies and mechanics. In a rare degree he 
possessed those two virtues without which one 
may not profitably serve in India—love and pa- 
tience. After the noon-meal we had prayers. 
Then the mission builder and statesman was a 
little child, simple, direct, confident in his fellow- 
ship with his Father; a householder with the needs 
of family and friends on his heart, a shepherd con- 
cerned for his flock, an ambassador reporting to 
his King and asking for instructions. 

Frequently we differed on questions of mission 
policy, and in his capacity as Chairman of our 
Mission Reference Committee, Mr. Moore had to 
vote against a measure upon which he knew that 
I had set my heart. I accepted his veto without 
question, remembering the old prayer-times and 
grateful for the friendship of one so true to his 
Master and to his interpretation of wise methods, 
that not even the desire to please a young mis- 
sionary in whom he was interested as in a daugh- 
ter, could deflect his vote. This man of rare gifts 
gave of his best as unstintingly to the poorest tea- 
garden coolie that came his way as he did to the 
highest government official or the most promising 
or most trying missionary. Yet was not the gift 
appreciated by the native church in Nowgong. 
The history of this church was not unlike that of 
the young church at Corinth, as may be gleaned 
from Paul’s first letter to them. There was among 


THE WETTEST LAND 61 


them “ envying, and strife and divisions,” and this 
burden of the church broke their leader’s health 
and heart. — 

Tenderly his brother carried him down to Cal- 
cutta where skilful surgeons tried to discover the 
seat of his trouble. They could find no disease 
nor organic disorder; neither could they stay the 
ebbing life. When missionaries and native Chris- 
tians from all over Assam were gathered together 
in Nowgong for a conference for which Mr. Moore 
had made preparations, news of the good man’s 
going Home was received by wire. A thousand 
men and women sobbed together; from the cor- 
ners, the center, the rear and front of the great 
grass tabernacle, proud men arose crushed, hum- 
bled and penitent, declaring that they had killed 
him with their false pride, that they had broken his 
heart with their waywardness; leaders of factions 
in the strife and divisions, sought one another and 
begged forgiveness; secret sins were confessed, a 
better life was pledged and the burden of every 
man’s sob was, “‘ He loved me so, and I didn’t de- 
serve it; now I can never repay him.” 

A grave was dug in the well-kept English ceme- 
tery where are laid to rest a few score planters, 
officials and missionaries. A prominent Moham- 
medan of the town sought for audience with those 
in charge of the funeral arrangements and begged 
that the ashes be laid, not amongst foreign but with 
the Indian dead, “ for,” said the Mohammedan, 


62 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


“he lived for us; he lived most of his life with 
us; he died for us; let him be buried with us. 
He would so have had it.” Even so was it done, 
for when the brother returned from Calcutta with 
the urn of ashes, he said that some time before his 
illness Mr. Moore had requested that in the event 
of his death, he be rolled in a bamboo mat and 
buried in the native Christian cemetery. So the 
Hindus claimed him in his cremation, and Moham- 
medans and Christians in his burial. 

The day of the funeral, schools, court-house and 
government offices were closed and Hindu, Mo- 
hammedan and Christian officials and coolies, 
joined in loving tribute and walked in the proces- 
sion to the open field where the Christian dead 
are buried. There in a flower-lined grave they 
placed the ashes of Pitt H. Moore, who had loved 
them unto the end. So passed the missionary-hero 
who did not strive nor cry; neither did any man 
hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed did 
he not break, and smoking flax did he not quench, 
but in love and patience, like Enoch of old, “ he 
walked with God and was not, for God took him.” 
This type of Christian worker and lover is the 
dominant type on every mission-field. 

But more than in any native Christian or fellow- 
missionary, is the young missionary apt to be dis- 
appointed in himself. With at least a fair degree 
of training, with high and holy hope, he dedicates 
himself and all his abilities to a high task. He 


THE WETTEST LAND 63 


goes forth yearning for an opportunity to sacrifice, 
to burn out in service for Christ. He is sometimes 
disappointed to find himself housed in a com- 
fortable, screened bungalow rather than the rude 
shelter he had imagined would be his home. He 
is inclined to be impatient with the measure of 
social formalities imposed by residence in a Eu- 
ropean colony of officials, planters, and commer- 
cial men, when he longs for more time to establish 
points of contact with the natives. He chafes 
against mission red-tape as an untrained colt 
chafes at bridle and saddle. He frets under re- 
strictions necessitated by an Oriental attitude 
toward sex. His patience is ravelled by native 
procrastination and sloth. He rebels against es- 
tablished methods, resents the Easterner’s dislike 
of change, and even more fiercely resents every 
semblance of Orientalism that stamps his fellows 
long-resident in the country. Perhaps most of all 
he dislikes the general European attitude towards 
these subject brown people. Tasks multiply and 
more and more little duties that he had not 
counted on, drain the time and strength dedicated 
to the great task, and encroach upon the time he 
had set aside for quiet and communion with his 
Lord. 

Then there comes a night in the valley of 
humiliation. He realizes that he has failed: failed 
to learn of those he came to teach; failed to profit 
by the wisdom of those long-experienced in the 


64 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


task; failed to remain entirely free of the patron- 
izing manner he so keenly resented when he first 
detected it in others. He knows that sentient 
hands of brown men have handled him, that noth- 
ing has escaped the calm eyes that have been tak- 
ing his measure, or the patient ears that have 
sounded his depth. He knows that in patience 
and love and understanding, he has failed brown 
brother and white colleague,—that as he was dis- 
appointed in them, so, too, have they been disap- 
pointed in him. “They made me the keeper of 
the vineyards: but mine own vineyard have I not 
kept.” Slowly stars of promise and resolve 
lighten the gloom until a morning of clearer vision 
dawns. He sees that the big task is made up of 
small duties done in a noble way; that the sacri- 
fices to be made are not necessarily of a sanitary 
house and many of the comforts of life, but the 
more subtle sacrifice of cherished ideas and per- 
sonal opinions; that not always is the missionary 
called to the loneliness and privation of Living- 
stone’s pioneer career, but often is challenged to 
live in Christian love and fellowship, in close quar- 
ters with other strong natures not in all things in 
accord with his own. As he mingles with those 
in the European colony he finds that there are 
white men, too, on his foreign field with hearts 
feeling after God. He comes to regard mission 
red-tape as a necessary voucher for well-meaning 
folk in the homeland who question the wisdom and 


THE WETTEST LAND 65 


honesty of their representatives abroad. He sees 
that in this foreign land he has much to learn as 
well as much to teach. Brightest of all the lights 
in this new dawn is the conviction that there need 
be no more nights in the valley of humiliation if 
part of every day is spent alone with Him in 
Whose service he is engaged. 


The establishment of a kindergarten and board- 
ing department occupied most of my first term of 
service. The purpose of the kindergarten was to 
try to wedge into the indifference of Hinduism and 
Mohammedanism, seemingly untouched after sev- 
enty years of mission work. The boarding-school 
was designed to gather for training in Christian 
living, home-making, and school-work, some of the 
most promising girls from the little Christian vil- 
lages in the foot-hills forty-two to seventy miles 
from Gauhati. 

The old Indian boarding-school* was harshly 
criticised as a denationalizing institution. In the 
old schools the students were usually housed in a 
single large dormitory with cement floors; they 
slept on iron cots, their food was prepared in one 
portion for the whole school and their clothing was 
sent outside to be laundered. Many of our Chris- 
tian evangelists and teachers preferred to marry 

* The substance of what appears on this, and the two fol- 
lowing pages, is contained in a booklet entitled Satribari 


School which I wrote for distribution by The Board of Mis- 
sionary Cooperation, Northern Baptist Convention.—E. M. H. 


66 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


uneducated girls rather than take a wife whose 
training in such a boarding-school unfitted her for 
. happy, helpful living in the typical Indian home— 
a little house of mud walls and floor, beds of 
bamboo and a rounded hole in the ground for a 
stove. The old boarding-school girl did not know 
how to keep the mud floors beautiful with the 
smear of thin mud; after having slept some years 
on a woven spring mattress, she was not easily 
reconciled to the hard bamboo bed; neither did 
she know how to cook in small family portions, 
nor how to keep the clothing of her household 
clean. Trying to overcome these difficulties, we 
grouped our students into families and provided 
for them in typical Indian fashion. 

Just within the Gauhati municipal boundary, we 
secured about twenty-six acres of land on part of 
which we built a small model Christian village, 
with typical Indian homes, thatch roof, mud floors 
and walls, bamboo beds, etc. Each cottage has 
two bedrooms of six beds each and two occupants 
to a bed. The center or third room of each cot- 
tage is a living-room or study-room. This living- 
room is common to the two families occupying the 
cottage. Each family has its own little storeroom 
for vegetables and the weekly supply of rice, also 
a room in the cook-shed where the meals are pre- 
pared and eaten. Ten or twelve girls constitute a 
family. One of the number, an older girl, is 
chosen as house-mother, and another, house-auntie. 


THE WETTEST LAND 67 


The house-mother is responsible for the expendi- 
ture of the weekly allowance for vegetables and 
for the assignment and proper performance of the 
cooking, cleaning and general work of the house 
and yard. Other important members of the family 
group are the babies and their mothers. For 
each family has a family baby—sometimes a babe 
in arms, sometimes a couple of months or more 
than a year old. The babies are the most im- 
portant part of the scheme. They have done 
more than any other agency for the development 
of the beautiful in our girls. The baby-mother is 
responsible for feeding, bathing, and the general 
care of her little one, dressing and putting her to 
bed, washing and mending for her. Faithlessness 
to her trust entails its forfeiture both for house 
mothers and baby mothers. Over all the families, 
as a sort of grandmother, is a capable, understand- 
ing Indian Christian widow, the mother of thirteen 
children of her own. When, as frequently hap- 
pens, a young man comes to the school seeking 
for a wife, I always considered as ineligible those 
girls that have failed to show interest in or love 
for the babies in the school or have in any way 
neglected the little ones committed to their care. 
There is a very healthy and helpful rivalry be- 
tween the various baby mothers and also between 
the various house mothers and families for the 
best prepared food, the neatest house, the shiniest 
brass vessels in the cook-house, the trimmest gar- 


68 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


dens, tidiest personal appearance, etc. The plan 
has worked wonderfully well. It has been fol- 
lowed in our new mission boarding-school at Golo- 
ghat and has met with unstinted praise and the 
unqualified approval of the Indians, missionaries 
and government. But most of all is it commended 
by the fruit it has produced in the lives of the 
girls. 

In that first term there were several thrilling 
experiences that I had all but forgotten until I 
read the following letters that my home folk failed 
to consign to the waste-paper basket: 


Gauhati, 
(8) May, 1913. 
Dear Nettie: 

I’d give much to have you see the Indian jug- 
glers. They are clever! About ten days ago we 
had one do his tricks for boarders and day pupils. 
This fellow was as good as I have seen. He made 
smoke and fire come from his mouth, not for a 
second, but for fully two minutes. I tried to snap 
it, but it was among my blistered films. He did 
more than half of his tricks on the schoolmaster, 
which added to their interest for the children. 
He showed us a round tin box with a funnel- 
shaped top. We all looked into it. The school- 
master stuck his nose in. It was empty; it was 
sound and without an inner lining, so far as we 
could judge. The juggler filled it with water and 


THE WETTEST LAND 69 


then poured water out and poured it out, but the 
box remained always full and overflowing. The 
pundit saw that the box was still full of water and 
fastened the lid on. Then he held his hand out 
when the juggler immediately turned the can up- 
side down, pulled off the lid, but instead of the 
water and splash that we expected, out came a 
snake and shriek when the pundit felt it in his 
hand. The snake was put back and the lid put 
on, but when it was pulled off again, instead of a 
snake there were quantities of fragrant temple 
lilies,—so many tumbled out that they had to be 
jammed to get into the tin again. For an hour we 
enjoyed other tricks just as wonderful and knew 
that three rupees was good pay for the performer. 


Nowgong, Assam. 
Dear Friend-W ho-Couldn’t-Come: 

; Last week I had another ox-cart ride. 
Mrs. Kampfer did not really need me any longer, 
as she and the baby are doing nicely, so I went 
back to Nowgong, taking Profulla with me. Pro- 
fulla means Gladness, and this chubby child of 
four or five years is well named. She seems a 
composite of the ripple and gurgle of the streams 
of the hill country in which she was born and of 
the warmth and glow of the sunlight of the plains 
where she has flirted and frolicked through the 
years of babyhood. The resultant is a charming 
mixture of quiet shyness streaked with short sea- 


70 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


sons of cuddling and affection; reserve and wide 
distance maintained with strangers but a winsome 
familiarity and outpouring of confidential chatter 
for those whom she elects as friends. The child’s 
voice possesses such rare sweetness, that often I 
lose the sense of her rambles by listening to their 
music. Profulla’s almond eyes set in a broad flat 
face proclaim her Mongolian descent. She is a 
Naga,—a tribe of fearless hill-people living at 
China’s back door. 

We left Gauhati about noon of an intolerably 
hot day. For six hours we sat on the sunny side 
of the railway carriage. An Eurasian bridal couple 
sat on the shady side of the carriage and they an- 
noyed me even more than the heat. Not because 
they had the shady side of the carriage, but be- 
cause they sat at the extreme ends of the seat with 
seating room for three or four between them. Al- 
though Profulla, busy with the sights to be seen 
from the windows, politely turned her back to her 
fellow-passenngers and I buried myself in a 
magazine, nevertheless that bridal couple sat not 
one mite closer! In six hours, they exchanged 
exactly six remarks; it may be that they had lim- 
ited themselves to one remark an hour, for both 
bride and groom wore wrist-watches which they 
studiously scanned every few minutes. 

At Chaparmuk we changed from the railroad 
carriage to the ox-cart. Mr. Moore was at the 
station to see us safely in the cart before he took 


THE WETTEST LAND 71 


the train for upper Assam. My suitcase and par- 
cels were stowed in front of the cart behind the 
driver’s seat and Profulla and I climbed into the 
back of the cart. The driver, a mere boy, yoked 
the oxen, and we jolted on our way. When a 
friendly cloud hid the sun we scrambled from the 
cart and walked several miles under wonderful 
sunset clouds with lights and shadows playing on 
field and jungle, clothing the Mikir Hills with 
that indescribable blue haze with which Nature 
weaves evening dress for her high places. While 
the sky still retained some of the glow of evening 
embers, Venus sparkled pure and gold in her bed 
of blue: almost immediately every vestige of 
colour disappeared from the clouds, leaving Venus’ 
bright rays to reflect fallen gems in every stream 
and flooded place. Other stars were faintly 
twinkling; Arcturus was sliding down the west- 
ern horizon hard upon the lost sun; Vega and 
Altair were shining bright and clear west of the 
zenith where the cross of Cygnus was spread. 
There was no moon. Before Auriga was well over 
the east it became densely dark, seemingly in a 
moment. We had walked quite a distance, so 
climbed into the cart again. 

Profulla chatted until she fell asleep. Then I 
wanted more than ever to get out and watch the 
lightning as it tore livid rents in the black sky. 
I leaned from the cart ready to jump when I 
thought about snakes. I do not know just what 


72 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


effect storms have upon these gliding creatures, 
and it was very, very dark, except when the light- 
ning flashed. Much as I love storms in the open, 
more do I fear snakes in the dark, so I stayed in 
the cart. That was a regal storm such as fre- 
quently marks the end of the monsoon. For hours 
the thunder cannonaded with echoing rumbles in 
the hills. The lightning was vividly sharp and al- 
most incessant. It struck trees which crashed to 
the ground in beds of broken branches and twigs. 
After the fury of the storm had abated, the rain 
came in torrents. Wind, thunder and lightning 
still raged with tropic passion, but not with the 
madness of the first onslaught. Exhausted by the 
excitement of the day, Profulla slept soundly. 
We must have been in the storm several hours, 
when one of the oxen threw the yoke and in doing 
so, set the cart at right angles with the road. We 
were backed towards a body of water which I sup- 
posed was a flooded rice-field. The cart wheels 
were perilously near the edge of the bank. Ifthe 
cart should receive the slightest impetus in that 
direction, it would roll down into the water. The 
driver was dancing on the fork of the cart trying 
to reach the balky beast with a stick. If he con- 
tinued such capers, either he or the oxen would 
have us in the water or turned over in the mud. 
The only vernacular I can speak is Assamese, and 
as yet I’m not very fluent in that. The driver 
spoke only Hindustani and could not understand 


THE WETTEST LAND 713 


Assamese. I called to him to jump to the ground 
to manage his beasts. Of course he did not under- 
stand me. I straddled Profulla across my hip, 
after the Assamese fashion of carrying their 
young, and started for the front of the cart, in- 
tending to jump to the ground. 

Just then the boy pulled the balking ox against 
the cart with a thud. The other ox slipped from 
under the yoke and sent the cart rolling down, 
down, the bank into the water. Incidentally it put 
out the lantern which had hung from the bottom 
of the cart, and left us in dense darkness, except 
for the lightning. The tongue of the cart was em- 
bedded in the slime and mud of the bank. An ox- 
cart is quite high even when standing level, and 
our baggage, placed in the front of the cart, tilted 
it towards the tongue, so raising the back of the 
wagon; nevertheless water came into the cart at 
the back. There was a strong, swift, storm-fed 
current. It was not a rice-field, but a river,—the 
Noi Kolung—freighted with the debris of the 
storm. Flashes of lightning showed that it was 
quite wide. It was impossible to stay in the cart. 
At any moment it might assume its natural posi- 
tion when unyoked, and tip backwards in spite of 
the baggage weighting the front. I did not relish 
the prospects of being dumped in a heap out into 
the river, with a little one to care for and probably 
some baggage beside the mattress and cart tum- 
bled on top of us. The wind rendered the um- 


74 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


brella useless even if we could have bothered with 
it. Our clothing was already saturated. The 
driver sat at the head of the cart wailing as only 
an Oriental can. I climbed over the baggage, car- 
rying Profulla pig-a-back, walked on the tongue of 
the cart through the water to the bank. Time and 
again while climbing the clay bank we slipped 
back grasping a broken twig or a handful of up- 
rooted grass and mud, but finally, muddy and 
drenched, we reached the road. 

The lightning revealed clusters of banana-trees 
and betel-palms in the distance. In the jungle, 
banana and betel trees are signs of habitation, so 
we started in the direction of the sighted trees, 
Profulla walking alongside and clinging to my 
skirts as she scolded the driver. Only once when 
the lightning was unusually sharp, she clung to my 
skirts and begged to be carried. When the light- 
ning flashed we would run as far as it revealed the 
way. In the dark we stood still and waited. 
Deep puddles flooded the jungle-path, but we 
waded right through them, for we were already 
drenched and a little more wet did not matter. 

The first path branching from the road seemed 
to lead nowhere, but the lightning revealed build- 
ings beyond us, so we returned to the road and 
took the second path which led to a little native 
hut and two unwalled bullock sheds. We knocked 
at the bamboo door and called and called, explain- 
ing that our cart had been backed into the river 





CROSSING THE BOKO RIVER IN A QUEEN’S 
CHAIR 





“MY FOUR ADOPTED BROWNIES” 


oa ass ‘ 





THE WETTEST LAND 75 


and we were seeking shelter from the storm. We 
waited what seemed a long time but no answer 
came, although we heard voices within. The 
driver must have been frightened after we left 
him, for after a while he appeared in the bullock 
shed and knocked on the hut door saying many 
things in Hindustani. But the door remained 
shut and the hut was still dark. The bullock shed 
was tiny, crowded with bullocks, and leaked, so 
the earthen floors were a sorry mess. Voices were 
again heard in the hut and a ray of light showed 
through a hole made in the bamboo door for a 
chain. We renewed our appeals and waited. 
Finally the door opened a little way and a fright- 
ened man with a little lamp held in the shade of 
his hand asked in Assamese what we wanted. At 
the sound of Assamese I gathered confidence and 
courage, for I know the vernacular well enough to 
understand all that he said and to make myself 
understood after a fashion. Sometimes more than. 
a common means of speech is necessary to under- 
standing, however, and it was so in this case. I 
could not understand that under such circum- 
stances one human being should have to beg an- 
other for aid and that it would be denied seemed 
incredible. But this man would not let us into his 
house. He would not help the cartman with the 
cart. He would help in the morning if I gave him 
a rupee. Then I asked for a lantern or light of 
some kind. He did not have a lantern. The 


76 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


native lamp that he held in his hand was a little 
cup cut from empty kerosene tins, with tiny tin 
pipe-stem opening in the center of the top through 
which the rag wick is drawn. When I asked him 
for one of these, he appeared with another of the 
little shadeless tins that sell for a cent each and 
said that he would lend us one, but how was he 
to know that we would return it. I had no money 
but remembered my cameo ring. I took it off and 
thrusting it at the man told him that it was worth 
many rupees and hundreds of tin lamps. Still 
holding the lamp, he put the ring as far on his 
hand as it would go. Ina rage I seized upon the 
lamp and shouted above the storm, ‘‘ You’re a 
mean, mean man! Sometime you will be in trouble 
and I hope many, many people will help you and 
make you ashamed of yourself for your meanness 
to us tonight.”’ In my excitement I mixed English 
and Assamese indiscriminately. The fellow may 
have thought I cursed him. He declared himself 
to be a good man, drew the ring from his finger, 
said he did not want it and insisted upon my tak- 
ing it back. 

We carried the lamp back to the cart, the wind 
blowing it out on the way. There were only two 
matches left in the driver’s store. Because of the 
wind blowing the lamp we could not stay under 
the trees. We had to risk the cart which was still 
upright. Drawing the baggage a little further 
toward the front, Profulla and I sat on it to help 


THE WETTEST LAND £4) 


weight the forepart of the cart. Finding the 
driver’s tobacco box (an empty condensed milk 
can) hanging to the side of the cart at the front, 
I threw the tobacco into the river and dropped the 
lamp into the empty can to protect it from the 
wind. The wick above the pipe stem had burned 
out, the flame flickered and we were again in dark- 
ness and without matches. Suddenly I remem- 
bered having part of a box of matches in my hand- 
bag, I did not dare risk tilting the cart by reach- 
ing back for the bag, but fished for it with the tip 
of my umbrella. Fortunately, it was a leather bag 
lined with dog skin; though the outside of the bag 
was soaked the box of matches was dry. There 
were about a dozen matches in it. We pinched the 
burnt wick, put the lamp back into the empty can 
and relighted it. 

Suddenly the storm calmed somewhat. It still 
rained, but not torrentially; the lightning was no 
longer sharp; the wind did not blow. The driver 
started off gesticulating as he poured forth vol- 
umes of Hindustani. I had no idea as to what he 
meant to do, where he was going or why. Neither 
did I know where we were. In the Noi Kolung, 
of course, but in what part of the Noi Kolung? 
We might have been just outside Nowgong or only 
half-way there. I did not know whether it was 
midnight or nearly morning. The sky gave no 
promise of dawn though the twilight seemed ages 
past. I knew that the little lamp could not burn 


78 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


much longer. Profulla shivered with the cold. I 
wrapped her in the driver’s wet blanket for it was 
the driest thing at hand. Then we waited. 
Every kind of creature seemed disturbed. There 
were heavy splashes in the river all around us. 
They might have been caused by dropping brush 
or by fish, but they might just as well have been 
crocodiles or sharks, so I kept the closed umbrella 
in my hand pointed at the rear cart opening, de- 
termined that anything that might swim into the 
back of the cart should swallow the umbrella be- 
fore it did us. The water noises seemed to be 
augmented. Black shapes glided down the river. 
It would be better to wait on land even without the 
light. But just then jackals came howling and 
yelling that weird cry that savours so strangely 
of the laugh-sob of hysterics. The pack came 
yelping nearer than I cared to hear them. Frogs 
croaked. A bird gave a shrill shriek. I pictured 
it being stung by a snake. After all, it was prob- 
ably safer in the cart. Profulla went to sleep 
again on my lap. Slowly the time dragged on 
while I pondered what men did and how they lived 
before fire and artificial lights were used. The 
intermittent gleam of fireflies showed beautifully 
in the dark that brooded over land and water. 
Then I began to think how very much worse 
things might have been: had the cart tilted back- 
wards into the water, had there been no matches 
in the handbag, had there been no hut near the 


THE WETTEST LAND 79 


road, had there been a hungry tiger in the jungle 
(for this is famous tiger territory). Then the 
funny side of the affair began to appear. How 
terrified you home-folk would be if you could 
know of my plight! What would you not give for 
a glimpse of me huddled in a corner of such a 
queer houseboat, with a brown baby snugly 
sleeping in my arms! I smiled broadly in the 
dark. Time passed more quickly. ‘The sounds 
were not so alarming as they had been. Prospects 
were not hopeless. The experience would afford 
lots of fun afterwards. Why, it seemed like being 
a really truly missionary, with “ journeyings often, 
in perils of water, in perils in the wilderness, in 
weariness, in watchings often.” No, on the whole 
it was not half bad, and— 

The driver came back with a cart and a hurri- 
cane lantern with but little oil in it and a chimney 
so filthy that only a flicker of light could pierce 
through. The cart had nothing but broken nail- 
heads over the rough, bare floor, but it seemed 
luxurious. A bullock cart passed and we called 
to the driver for help, but his only reply was to 
drive a little faster. With difficulty we transferred 
the suitcase to the new cart and started for Now- 
gong, leaving the cart, mattress and other things 
to their fate. We reached our journey’s end as 
the clock struck four. 

Though Profulla had seemed not at all phased 
by the storm, she lost her nerve when taken out 


80 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


to the dormitory where about fifty strange little 
brown girls were sleeping, and would not be paci- 
fied until allowed to come into the bungalow and 
sleep on a pallet near the one she knew. 

That was the most destructive storm of the sea- 
son. Many large trees on the mission compound 
had been destroyed, and the town was littered with 
fallen trees and uprooted brush. The next day 
the cart was rescued. I had several notes of 
condolence from friends who grieved that I had 
met such a severe storm on the road, but never 
dreamed that I had spent part of the night on (or 
was it in?) the Noi Kolung. 


V 
SOME LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 


chapter to letters written home at various 

times. They describe intimately the various 
experiences which were mine at the time they were 
written, and have the value of being impressions 
of the time rather than observations made in long 
retrospect: 


| PROPOSE to devote practically this entire 


April 6, 1913. 
My Dear Ones: 

If you could look in on us this morning you 
would wonder what has happened. Curtains and 
pictures down, tables and chairs piled up, soaked 
rugs spread out-of-doors, school furniture and sup- 
plies piled on the veranda, the children’s things 
hanging all about, the organ with its leather cover 
curled up ready to shed and the wood crinkled as 
with a curling iron. All these things piled on the 
back veranda as in a storage room for rubbish, 
the other parts of the house without a stick of 
furniture, yard of drapery or bit of carpet, but 
floors covered with the muddy tracks of boots and 
brooms, the walls drenched and the wet plaster 
making the place ill-smelling. You see we had a 
tornado Saturday night. Some of the hailstones, 


weighed afterwards on the scales, were a quarter 
81 


82 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


to a half-pound each. They pelted our asbestos 
roof and riddled it like so many bullets. The tor- 
rents poured through these holes and came through 
the ceiling at such a rate that walking through the 
front rooms was like walking through a drenching 
rain. The wind tore the screening from the front 
veranda, uprooted great trees and twisted off the 
branches of others as though they had been so 
many pieces of pottery. The schoolhouse roof was 
lifted on one side, curled as hair around a finger, 
and thrown off to the side. ‘Then the stones 
punched holes in the 4 x 6 foot composition black- 
board that we had made last week, and the wind 
wrenched it from its frame and hurled it out-of- 
doors like useless chaff. A large supply wardrobe 
was thrown on its face. The supports for the 
flower-boxes in the kindergarten gave way and the 
boxes fell,—kindling and soil mixing with broken 
glass, fallen pictures and torn curtains, in one 
grand, hasty pudding. 

At the very beginning of the havoc, the light- 
ning tossed about fifteen feet off the top of a huge 
teak tree between the house and the girls’ cottage, 
as one flecks a crumb from a table. As it fell the 
tree crashed against the wall of the girls’ house, 
knocking it in just where the girls sleep. For- 
tunately, their heads were on the inner end of their 
pallets. The mothers grabbed their babies, the 
bigger girls took the smaller ones and rushed down 
stairs. Four of the girls were in the bungalow 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 83 


with me and when the storm started and the tree 
crashed Proba rushed over to the bungalow, but 
we could scarcely force the door of the screen- 
porch open to let her in. She was only a foot or 
two from me and I yelled with all my strength, 
but the hail had set in with such din, while the 
thunder, crashing trees and falling glass made so 
much noise that we couldn’t hear our own voices. 
The hailstones fell with such force that they re- 
bounded from the ground and it seemed that light- 
ning and hail both were coming up from the earth 
as well as down from above. 

When I could get out to the cottage the girls 
were all huddled together, the larger girls carry- 
ing the smaller ones. The matron and many of 
the larger girls were weeping hysterically, but the 
little children were wide-eyed, but quiet and with- 
out sign of a tear. In the bungalow we were like 
drowned rats with the water above our ankles, so 
we couldn’t bring the girls in here. Just as soon 
as the storm permitted them to get out, Mr. 
Stephen and the coachman came to see if we were 
all right and what they could do to help us out. 
We went over to the Stephen bungalow and slept 
there, or rather lay down on the floor and talked 
until it was light enough to get out and see what 
damage had been done. We were hardly settled 
in the bungalow when the chief Government of- 
ficial came to see if there were any casualties on 
our compound. It is a marvel that but five people 


84 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


were killed by falling houses or pelting stones. 
Many were bruised with the hailstones, but were 
saved serious injury by crawling under the bamboo 
beds when the stones cut through the thatch roof. 

The next morning we were up at dawn, and 
such havoc on all sides! Half of the big trees on 
our compound were down, and all through the 
town there were so many uprooted trees that they 
had to dynamite them and get a couple hundred 
prisoners out to clear them from the roads. A 
great rubber tree in which a community of flying 
foxes stay, crashed to the ground killing several 
score of these.loathsome, ill-smelling creatures that 
are neither bird nor beast. Frogs and rats lay 
where a stone had struck them. Birds were wail- 
ing for their nests and young. The ground bore 
deep pockmarks of hail. The poor houses of the 
coolie class were heaped piles of rubbish, their oc- 
cupants happily fishing in the flooded gutters and 
fields, or gathered in groups reporting their feel- 
ings and experiences of the night before and agree- 
ing that not even from their fathers’ fathers had 
they ever heard of such a storm. Some people 
prayed that night who do not usually have evening 
prayers. 

The roads were impassable for wheeled vehicles, 
but we saddled our ponies, went over or around 
the heaps of debris in the road, and looked up most 
of our outside school children to see if any were in 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 85 


distress. We think that the storm was quite local 
and that none of our other stations were hurt. 


Gauhati, 
Feb; 3, 1913: 

. . Last week an anxious mother came to in- 
quire why her boy plays so much in school and is 
whipped so little! Last week I was out two after- 
noons visiting in the homes and hearing the chorus, 
“Whip them more, Missahib!” This afternoon I 
was talking to my perpetually bad girl. The only 
good she does is in promising, but there is some- 
thing about the child that I love. I stood her in 
a corner this afternoon and when I was talking 
with her after school, trying to show her the folly 
of making promises only to break them and telling 
her that she could not come to school unless she 
behaves and lets those around her behave, she told 
me with sober sobbing that if I would only whip 
her hard she might be good! Wonderful East! 


Zenana Mission House, 
Darjeeling, 
August 12, 1913. 
Dear Home-folk: 

. . Have I written you about our trip to see 
the sunrise on Everest? I don’t mean that we 
went to Everest, but last Wednesday morning I 
was up at quarter past one and waited until quar- 
ter of four for my pony and the rest of the party. 


86 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


I had a splendid spirited pony that was so impa- 
tient to go that he wouldn’t be still while I 
mounted, so I had to gallop off with my stirrup 
a little too short. Oh, but it was a glorious ride— 
uphill most of the way. The beast went like the 
wind, leaving the others one by one, quite far be- 
hind. I guess he doesn’t often have a burden as 
light as eighty-nine pounds to carry. There was 
a wind stirring and enough sharpness in the air to 
make one’s blood tingle. As we galloped through 
the cantonments at Jalaphar the sentinel chal- 
lenged me, but I hadn’t time to shout, ‘‘ I’m going 
to Tiger Hill,” before the pony was off madly, 
again. Just as the morning star dimmed I crossed 
the little settlement at Ghoom, which lies between 
the hill I had crossed and the one I had yet to 
climb. I feared the pink of dawn would appear 
before I reached the hilltop, so I let the pony have 
the lines and go his own pace. He, too, seemed 
possessed by the spirit of the morning so galloped 
most of the way. 

When we reached the observation platform on 
top of the hill, the sky was aglow and the nearer 
snows shone between two banks of clouds... . 
Dawn flooded the plains below with their great 
swollen rivers lying like thin strands of silver 
across the land. The grand line of snow peaks 
was covered with every roseate shade and flecked 
with gold and hints of green. The clouds shifted 
and moved sometimes in filmy mists, sometimes 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 87 


in huge masses, with white fleecy bits snuggled 
here and there on great mountain bosoms, all con- 
tinually changing shape and catching different 
colours. We watched the shifting masses until 
the sun was quite strong. Kanchanjanga was ma- 
jestic, so dazzlingly white in the sun that she 
seemed a great scintillating jewel. But Everest 
did not show that morning. I was sorry, for some 
who watched with us will probably not have an- 
other opportunity to see this peerless peak, and 
were but little consoled when those of us who have 
seen it, explained that from this point of observa- 
tion, it can not compare in grandeur with any of 
the dozen glistening crowns that we were look- 
ing at. 


Timi, Sikim, India, 
October 6, 1913. 
Dear Ones at Home: 

. . . Eighteen miles on my circuitous trip home 
to Gauhati. Timi is twenty-six miles from Dar- 
jeeling. The road is as many miles of every 
variety of beauty. We left Darjeeling, Thursday 
about four P. M. and were entertained at a tea- 
garden about six miles out, or rather down, for 
the road was all down hill, and in some places so 
steep that there were stone stairways. Of course 
we didn’t ride over these, but it was too grotesque 
to see the syces leading the ponies down. After a 
bit the poor creatures’ ankles knocked together so 


88 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


that you would think they couldn’t go on. We 
had sent the coolies on ahead with our baggage, 
but when we arrived at Mrs. Shannon’s we found 
that the coolies had not yet come. It was about 
seven and quite dark except for good starlight. 
We had tea according to the English custom of re- 
freshing guests, and sat on the veranda until 
eight, waiting for the coolies, for knowing that 
these people dress for dinner we had each packed 
a dinner-dress. But when the baggage hadn’t 
come at eight, we went to our room, washed up 
and put back our soiled clothes for dinner. 

The English seem to go in for silver so much 
more than we do, but do not use cut-glass as much, 
probably because the servants break so much. 
They serve their meals in delightful style. After 
dinner we had a few games and then to bed. In 
the morning we walked around the garden before 
breakfast, and such a lovely garden it was! The 
shady side of the hill faces the snows, and here 
Mr. Shannon has set out masses of ferns and 
orchids. It is one of the most beautiful bits of 
garden I have ever seen. These people are very 
fond of their garden; both of them are botanists. 
They watch the birds and have learned about 
them; they collect butterflies; they entertain those 
who cannot return their hospitality. After break- 
fast Mr. Shannon walked with us several miles 
through his garden on to the Government road. 
Then the way lay through a forest, and such but- 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 89 


terflies we saw! Large as birds, some seemed; 
some were black with bars of white and other 
colours, some brilliantly hued. 

As we continued downhill it became warmer and 
warmer until we reached the river that separates 
Bengal from Sikim. Here we mounted the horses 
that had been sent on before, and started up the 
mountain on the other side of the river. About 
four o’clock we reached the dak bungalow where 
we were to spend the night. It is the great puja 
time, when most natives work little and drink 
much. The coolies had left the bridge before us 
and should have reached the bungalow shortly 
after we did. After having waited for them more 
than an hour, we decided to go to the bazaar and 
try to find something to eat as we had had noth- 
ing since morning. A crowd of curious people 
tagged after us in the bazaar, but no one could 
tell us where we might get fruit or eggs, so we 
went back to the bungalow empty-handed, washed 
our hands without soap, dried them on our petti- 
coats, and went to bed. I woke up to hear dishes 
rattle. The coolies had arrived and we ate and 
ate, and drank and drank. 

After the cool of Darjeeling, the place seemed 
close and stuffy. There was but one window; the 
door was half off its hinges. Knowing that the 
natives were all drinking and that we were the 
only Europeans anywhere about, I took two big 
hat-pins and put them by my pillow. Neither of 


90 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


us slept very much. We were up about six in the 
morning, had breakfast, packed the bedding and 
left the village about nine. The rest of the jour- 
ney lay almost entirely through forests. It was 
shady and got cooler and cooler as we ascended. 
About noon we came to the second valley and 
began another descent. This road was darker and 
damper than the one we had come. It was too 
hard on the ponies to ride them down such steep 
grades, so we dismounted and fed them while 
waiting for the syces to come. Then we saw that 
we had stirred up leeches. One pony had about 
twenty around his mouth and ever so many others 
on his head and feet. We, too, had the things pac- 
ing their queer way over our boots. Between the 
soles and about the tongue they had made their 
way inside. We daren’t sit down to take off our 
shoes, so one supported the other while we 
hunted out the clingers. The last of the walk 
downhill was very wearying so tea, served as soon 
as we arrived, was very refreshing. 

The place here is beautiful. The snows are 
nearer than at Darjeeling. The second range that 
we see from our bedroom is snow-capped. In 
front of the house is a high hill across a narrow 
valley through which a stream flows as a silver 
girdle. On either side of the foremost hill are 
spurs and saddles of several ranges. Here the 
clouds perpetually chase light and shade; it is ever 
varying, always lovely. Mrs. MacKean, our hos- 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 91 


tess, fits wonderfully well in this mountain setting. 
She is big in her spirit, natural in her manner and 
an ideal helpmeet for a lonely frontier missionary. 
There is a little girl almost six and as interesting 
as free life in these marvelous hills can make a 
child who has wise, cultured parents. 


Gauhati, Assam, 
Feb. 17, 1914. 
You Dear-People-Who-Are-Home: 

. . Pve just concluded one of the most inter- 
esting of all my interesting experiences. I’ve been 
out in the district! . . . I didn’t get my home 
letter off last week, because there is only a weekly 
post from the place where we were, and that was 
too late for the foreign mail. In fact the post 
never finds Barigaon, the village where we stayed 
for the Association, but the men carry the mail 
once a week about eight miles into the bazaar, and 
get the village mail for the week at the same time. 

I took our big girl, Sumuri, and the baby and 
left here Tuesday about three P. M. About fif- 
teen miles out Isabelle met us with the American 
wagon. We rested at the dak bungalow for the 
night and were up the next morning at four-thirty 
and away on the road again by six. There is only 
one seat, and the baggage occupies the back of the 
wagon, so we took turns riding on the seat and on 
the baggage. We passed scores of people carry- 
ing, on either end of a long shoulder-stick, bamboo 


92 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


baskets of greens, silk cocoons, pottery and other 
wares, to a large weekly bazaar in a nearby tea- 
garden. 

About one o’clock we came to the river where 
we transferred ourselves and baggage into a dug- 
out, i. e., a hollowed tree-trunk, and made the 
rest of the journey by water. It is when I am see- 
ing beautiful bits of country that I fairly ache to 
have you at home see them with me. It is not 
when things are sad or hard that I am smitten with 
loneliness, but when there is something glad or 
beautiful, that I yearn to have you share it with 
me. . . . There are low, dipping foothills on both 
sides of the river, and more or less jungle on the 
skirting road. At first the midday glare marred 
perfect enjoyment, but later in the afternoon the 
hills cast long shadows on the water and draped 
themselves in purple, the wild cocks crowed as 
they went to nest, and mating birds singing ves- 
pers made the evening melodious. It was moon- 
light when we landed on the sands of Barigaon 
and a short walk across the sandy stretch brought 
us to the village proper and to dear faithful 
Rhanji with supper ready to be served. 

They had built us a basha of grass and bam- 
boos, of one large room with the back screened off 
by grass and built up with a bamboo platform 
with a layer of rice straw on top. This platform 
was at once our bed and bedroom. The front of 
the grass partition served as living- and dining- 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 93 


room. Here, too, a carpet of straw protected us 
from the cold earth. Whenever our living-room 
failed to accommodate the crowds that visited us, 
the people on the outside parted the dried grass 
walls with their hands and thrust their heads 
through. Our living-room opened onto our bath- 
room, a little grass room about as large as a good- 
sized packing-case and without a lid. One side of 
this was furnished with a little bamboo platform 
that served as bathtub. We stood on this and 
poured water over our soaped bodies. Oh, it was 
life in the rough, but it was interesting! 

My heart yearned for the women and children. 
It is always upon these that heathenism places its 
heaviest blight. For the Garo village woman, life 
is a long day of labour with a short night of rest. 
They dry the rice and pound it to free it from the 
husk, they carry water from the stream and wood 
from the jungle, they cook, smear the floors with 
mud, gather silkworms from the jungle, feed them, 
spin and weave. In the garden-season the women 
transplant the young rice plants and help cut the 
ripened grain. Nevertheless, some of them have 
very sweet womanly faces,—such faces as the 
Gospel produces among all peoples. 

There were many, many things that were new 
to me. I saw more of the Gospel’s accomplish- 
ments in that one week than I had seen in the 
three years in Gauhati station. Those men led 
their meetings, elected their officers and conducted 


94 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


their business along proper parliamentary lines. 

. . The sad part is that the men seem advanced 
so far beyond the women that they cannot be com- 
rades in many things. Truly, it is only in Christ 
Jesus that there is neither male nor female. The 
men are decently clothed, for the most part. Often 
they wear a coat or blanket in addition to their 
shirt, and sometimes they have shoes and stock- 
ings; whereas the women usually have only a sack- 
like garment coming from under the arms to mid- 
way between the knees and ankles; at night they 
wear cotton over the upper part of the body, 
but very seldom a bodice or shirt, almost never a 
coat, blanket or shawl, and never shoes and stock- 
ings. While I shivered in my heavy coat in the 
cold night-fogs, the women sitting all around me 
took off the covering from their shoulders to wrap 
it about some of their little children that slept at 
their feet, leaving their own shoulders and bosom 
exposed to the cold. 

These same hard-worked, ill-dressed women 
have paid very nearly fifty dollars to send eight 
girls chosen from different churches of the district 
to our boarding-school. These people are so poor 
that it is almost impossible for them to pay any- 
thing as individuals. They will make more effort 
to educate their boys, but they are not used to the 
thought of educating a girl. And Rhanji,—oh! I 
love the honest, generous, loving heart under his 
brown skin! Rhanji gets sixteen rupees a month 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 95 


and is going to keep four of his nieces in school, 
paying six rupees for their board and finding all 
their clothes, books, and supplies. Rhanji is an 
inspiring joy. As we were coming home with the 
girls, I walked behind Rhanji on the trail, and the 
dear, baby-loving bachelor confided to me these 
big thoughts, “ You know, Missahib, these girls 
going into school mean more than we see today. 
They will go in and get things that are good to 
know; then they will come back and slowly, 
slowly, the village will have what the girls got in 
school; and another year more girls will go from 
other villages and they will get these things to 
share in their villages; and then it will be with us 
something as it is with the sahibs and memsahibs 
in the house.” He meant, I think, that then Garo 
husbands and wives will share all things, even their 
thoughts, as missionary husbands and wives do. 


Gauhati, Assam, 
March 24, 1916. 
Dear Little Mother: 

. . . Last week there was a great Hindu festival 
on. I have always heard it spoken of as the red 
powder puja, because red powder is thrown on 
pedestrians much as flour used to be thrown by 
children at Hallowe’en at home. This is supposed 
to be the most obscene of Hindu festivals, one 
about which one is constantly warned not to ask 
questions. It is the principal festival of the year 


96 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM | 


in the section in which our Hindu pundit lives. 
People of that region treasure their specially fine 
cloths, loom-parts, brassware, ivory and other pro- 
duce to exhibit and sell at this time. I have long 
wanted to visit the pundit’s home and so get an 
inside view of Hindu life, and this holiday was my 
last opportunity to do so before going home; so I 
went. 

It was decided that I must have one of the ser- 
vants go with me in case anything happened. The 
bearer was sent but missed the early morning 
train, so the pundit and I started off alone. And 
yet not alone, either, for every available inch of 
space in the whole train was taken before we left 
Gauhati. People were even crowded in the bag- 
gage car, a closed steel compartment without win- 
dows. It was a local train, and at every station 
along the way there were frantic scrambles for 
places—the people inside, screaming lest they be 
mashed in the jam, and beating back those on the 
outside who tried to force their way into the al- 
ready overcrowded space. The guards shoved in 
passengers wherever they could get a footing. 

We left the train at a little sun-baked station, 
supposedly five miles from the village. It was 
about half-past twelve and very, very hot. A 
young elephant and a pony were waiting at the 
station, and I was to take my choice of the ani- 
mals. Need I say that I made the elephant kneel 
and make stepping stones of his various joints, up 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 97 


which I climbed by the aid of his howdah rope- 
banister. There was not the regular howdah sort 
of chair that royalty and Europeans usually use 
when traveling by elephant, but only a plain kind 
of small mattress tied on with rope. We went as 
the birds fly—over the rice fields—shadeless, hot 
and dusty, but with a strong breeze. That five 
miles was closely related to twenty! We stopped 
at a Hindu village about half-way. The people 
gathered from nap, field and rice-pounding to stare 
at me. The village leader refreshed me with milk 
from a green cocoanut pulled while I entertained 
the women with pictures of Satribari and of you 
folk at home. None of the women and but few 
of the men had ever seen a white woman before. 
All along the road, men and women in the different 
villages through which we passed, asked where I 
was going, why I had come, and was the pundit 
going to have me for another wife! 

At the pundit’s house everything was ready to 
receive me. Full-grown banana trees had been 
cut down and planted at the entrance of the court- 
yard, after the approved fashion of honouring a 
guest. I was to occupy the prayer-house. The 
building was unwalled, but half of it had been 
screened in with portable bamboo mats and fur- 
nished with a chair, two tables and a bed with 
planks for a mattress. Some fruit was in brass 
dishes on a newspaper tablecloth. From the time 
of my arrival, Saturday about dusk, until I left 


98 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Monday morning about nine or ten o’clock, I was 
a source of great interest to the men, women and 
children. They were very curious as to my dress- 
ing and undressing, my eating and sleeping... . . 
They gathered in the morning before sunrise and 
separated the screens to see how I slept. I kept 
my eyes closed, pretending to sleep and hoping 
they would go away. When I turned over, this 
was reported by one of the watchers and others 
gathered to see if I would do it again. I happened 
to use the hand on which I wear my cameo ring 
to draw the covers closer over my face. This im- 
portant action was reported to the waiting crowd. 
Since my eating or cooking in any of their build- 
ings would have hopelessly polluted the same, they 
had erected a little enclosure of banana-tree stalks, 
with two holes in the ground for cooking. . . 
I knew that I would have fruit, so had brought 
only a bottle of malted milk and a tin of crackers, 
thinking these would suffice for the few days I in- 
tended to stay. Upon my arrival, a number of the 
leading men of the village were called together to 
decide whether or not I might be offered milk 
without endangering the caste of the villagers. 
After discussion it was decided that as I had come 
as a guest to the village, was thirsty and travel- 
worn, the warm milk might be offered me. I 
drank it. It is always a trial to drink cow’s milk 
here in India for the cows are so poorly fed that 
the milk tastes dirty, oily and altogether nasty. 





ELLA MARIE HOLMES— 


“One of those Foreign Missionaries” 


ae 





LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 99 


In the evening my host came to me in great straits 
to know what could be done about giving me food. 
The bearer had missed the train and they could 
not cook anything for me, but they would send 
for a Mohammedan from a village a mile or more 
away, for Mohammedans do not have caste, so 
may cook for Christians. When I found out that 
the villagers might boil water for me without hurt- 
ing their caste, I assured them that with boiled 
water I could make malted milk and would have 
all that I desired and get along beautifully... . 
The bearer arrived that evening. 

In the evening the village headman, the priest, 
surveyor, tax-collector, and another official came 
to pay their respects and to see what I was like. 
The priest is a young man studying in a Hindu 
divinity school in Gauhati and home only for the 
holiday. He spent the first part of the evening 
gauging and weighing me. Evidently he decided 
that he could risk the ‘contamination of acquain- 
tance and became quite cordial, asking me to see 
his wife the next day. After the men left, the 
women and children crowded in again and I enter- 
tained them until about ten o’clock when we all 
went with the pundit’s mother to see the fireworks. 
It was about twenty minutes’ walk. All the rice- 
field paths were alive with others bent to the cen- 
ter field whither we were making our way. Being 
women, we waited at every crossing until the front 
path was clear of men,—this although all in our 


100 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


party were very old women, women who served 
and do not observe purdah, or little girls who had 
not yet been kept in purdah. 

We sat down under a great tree and after a 
while torch-bearers came with singing and danc- 
ing carrying in their midst the gohain, or priestly 
incarnation of God. The whole crowd sang, rock- 
ets were fired, balloons were sent up, illuminations 
and set pieces lighted. Apart from photographs 
and elaborate set pieces, these fireworks compare 
very favourably with those seen on Inauguration 
Day and other notable occasions on the Monu- 
ment grounds in Washington. I supposed they 
had been purchased in Calcutta and was dumb- 
founded to find that they had been made by the 
villagers on the spot at a cost of about five hundred 
rupees. One very striking phase of the celebra- 
tion was the burning of a grass hut in which a 
goat had been bound but allowed to escape if he 
could as the hut blazed. I have not yet been able 
to learn the significance of this custom. 

I was tired, so about midnight asked to be ex- 
cused and went home with the pundit’s mother. 
The latter and a little girl slept on the floor in my 
room. I greatly alarmed the dear old lady when 
I kneeled to pray. Evidently she thought I was 
frightened or grieving and insisted upon my get- 
ting up from my knees! 

. . . They had a jungle-fowl shot for my dinner 
Sunday. They couldn’t touch it, so the bearer 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD 101 


brought it in from the jungle where it had fallen. 
It would have been pollution to have brought it 
into their courtyard so I was called outside to see 
it. The bearer had to take it back to the jungle 
to clean it and leave it there all day. He cooked 
it in the little house of banana stalks and I had 
to go out there to eat it or the pundit would have 
had to burn down the other house. 

Sunday I saw the village water-tank. It is 
green and foul. Everyone bathes in it when he 
comes to get his supply of water. There had been 
a scourge of smallpox in the village. More than 
a score of children bore the scars and on some the 
sores had not healed. A number had died with 
the disease, for there is no effort to segregate or 
vaccinate although the Government would have 
sent a government vaccinator to any village that 
needed it, had the people been willing to have him 
come. When I asked the two college men of the 
village why they had not insisted upon a vaccina- 
tor coming to them, they said that the women and 
ignorant people of the village would not consent 
to it for fear they might anger the goddess of 
smallpox and she send an awful scourge upon 
them! When I visited the women of the priest’s 
household, he wanted to have tea made for me, but 
I had decided to suffer extreme thirst rather than 
drink the bath-water of smallpox patients, even 
if it were boiled. With a pebble under my tongue, 
I walked miles Sunday, in great heat across un- 


102 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


shaded rice-fields, visiting women in I know not 
how many courtyards, and talking with them until 
my parched tongue could scarcely move in my 
dried, feverish mouth. . . . At the home of the 
pundit’s wife, they had a feast for me. It was 
laid on a handkerchief spread over a beautiful 
chased brass tray. There was milk (probably not 
boiled, so not to be tasted), a hard-boiled egg that 
had been shelled and thumb impressions taken on 
the white meat, puffed rice balls dipped in syrup, 
some sugar candy dusty from the bazaar, and 
some sugar cane cut into small pieces. I nibbled 
a bit of the candy, but knew that I was too thirsty 
and water too scarce to venture much sweet, even 
had it been clean. I devoured every bit of the 
sugar-cane and for the first time found its juice 
refreshing. When we got back to the pundit’s 
house about dark, I sucked the juice from an over- 
ripe native melon and devoured hot milk as though 
it were nectar for the gods. The headman and 
surveyor took me to the fair grounds where the 
people were sacrificing to the idols. The Brah- 
mins here said that if I took off my shoes I might 
go up where they sat right in front of the idols, 
provided I would make an offering to them. Need- 
less to say, I contented myself with seeing them 
from a distance. There were about ten drummers 
and six cymbal-clangers dancing in front of the 
idols. They were dripping with perspiration, al- 
though naked to the waist. 


LETTERS FROM THE FIELD — 103 


At night, after the men went back to the fair, 
I went out and sat down with the women at their 
evening prayers. They sing their prayers as they 
clap their hands, one acting as leader and the 
others answering her. It was altogether weird, 
and I was glad to steal off to bed even though later 
the women brought the lantern back and stood 
around looking at me. 

Monday we walked across the rice-fields to the 
station in one of the densest dust-storms I’ve 
known. I was so parched with thirst that I had 
to stop by the road and send the men to one of the 
villages to buy green cocoanuts that I might drink 
the milk before I could go on. You see it was the 
end of the long dry season with a blustery March 
wind to blow the dust. . . . ’'d not exchange this 
experience for a month or two of just ordinary 
living. . 


After five-and-a-quarter years’ service I went 
home on furlough, marveling at what God had 
wrought in spite of my failures and foolishness, 
and asking Him to allow me to go back again to 
try to do better. But I wanted to go back with 
my sister Nettie as self-supporting missionaries. 
So far as I know, in all of Assam all foreigners 
that are at all actively engaged in Christian ser- 
vice are paid workers. Several Hindus and Mo- 
hammedans have remarked to me that missionaries 
follow their vocation even as lawyers and physi- 


104 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


cians follow theirs, viz., they make their living so; 
that unsalaried Christian foreigners such as com- 
mercial men, officials, travelers, do not seem to be 
burdened with Christian work. I have often won- 
dered why more Christians of independent means 
do not live in non-Christian lands as laymen active 
in Christian service. 


AMERICAN BAPTIST FOREIGN MISSION SOCIETIES 


‘tte x M4 i 
* co RS toe SA Ss ye 
b} nate iaawy Panes De BOOM 
SIC Se, Saber dak teh OS 





VI 


ON FURLOUGH AND BACK TO WORK: 
MY SISTER NETTIE 


ness venture designed to finance my sister 

Nettie and myself on the field. After our 
business failed I had six weeks’ experience in hos- 
pital training, and then was busy with deputation 
work. Possibly deputation work is the most try- 
ing part of a missionary’s training. A healthy 
sense of humor is a helpful asset on the foreign 
field and just as helpful in deputation work. I 
think Christ sent His servants out two-by-two, 
knowing that two are better than one, not only 
because the one will lift up his fellow, but also that 
they might have someone with whom to laugh. 
Often what might appear mean or hard to a lone 
individual, will be an occasion for laughter when 
there is someone with whom to laugh. 

There are, for instance, such things as being met 
at the station by the pastor of the church in which 
you are to speak, and have this man of four years’ 
college and three years’ seminary training, greet 
you with the query, “ Are you the foreign mis- 
sionary?” What a temptation to reply, “ Yes, 
one of the species!” 


| P= of my furlough was spent in a busi- 


105 


106 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Then there is the pleasure of having the one 
who is to introduce you to your audience, ask 
you, after you have gone on the platform, in what 
mission field you have served, and the nature of 
your work, then give an introduction something 
like this: ‘‘ We are indeed privileged today in 
having Miss with us. We have all read 
about our sister’s work in Missions and other 
sources, and have followed her with interest, which 
will be all the greater after having had her with 
us today, and having looked into her face and 
heard her tell personally about her work.” 

Every missionary who has done much deputa- 
tion work finds it difficult to refrain from smiling 
when, after a long, hard day of reports followed 
by a luncheon and pageant, then more reports, and 
after many have left on early trains and the rem- 
nant is weary, the presiding officer announces: 
“We have saved the best until the last’ (some- 
times it is, ‘saved the cream for the last’’). “ We 
have with us one of our dear missionaries whom 
we all delight to honour, and she will take these 
last moments (usually seven to fifteen minutes) 
to tell us about her work.” 

Securing entertainment is frequently another 
source of amusement. As you stand, the center 
of a group, Mrs. X says that she would so love 
to have the missionary in her home, but Mr. X 
is not very well. Mrs. Y would be so pleased to 
take you home with her, but she is having some 





ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 107 


painting done. Mrs. Z assures you that she would 
not let anyone else have the privilege of entertain- 
ing you, but would selfishly claim it for herself, 
had she not two small children who make more 
noise than would be good for a tired speaker. 
Mrs. X suggests that Mrs. B be asked to take 
you—“ she is always willing to put people up, and 
has such a nice home.” Mrs. B graciously ac- 
cepts the guest offered her and proves a most de- 
lightful hostess with a family well-trained in the 
somewhat neglected art of true hospitality. This 
condition is usually limited to city churches. In 
rural districts one is apt to suffer from excessive 
entertainment, sometimes having three successive 
meals in the same town, with three different fam- 
ilies, the missionary entertaining the company in- 
vited for each meal, while the hostess is busy in 
the kitchen. 

Not yet has my bump of humor developed suffi- 
ciently to enable me to be amused or to smile when 
the matter of my expenses is being discussed in 
front of me, and two women hand me each a dollar 
bill, while the third fishes in her purse for two 
dimes and three nickels, which she hands me for 
“your work.” But I can greet with a grin a writ- 
ten request from a prominent mission worker to 
spend three extra days away from home (directly 
after two weeks of constant, hard deputation work 
and entertainment in thirteen strange homes) so 
as to fill two engagements in the same town but 


108 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


four days apart, on one railroad ticket and so save 
the “large Young People’s division ” of a wealthy 
city church three dollars car-fare. I wanted to 
reply that I had not found anyone in California 
willing to do any kind of work or waiting for one 
dollar a day. P. W. Wilson’s The Christ We 
Forget, in the third chapter, under “ A Mother’s 
Influence,” has a pertinent paragraph that we 
might take to heart with profit: “ Jesus was 
brought up as a gentleman, considerate of others, 
yet able to rebuke all liberties. Simon the Phari- 
see might be rich, and our Lord longed to win his 
heart; but Simon must not forget the usual courte- 
sies of a host, merely because Jesus was a mis- 
sionary without private means.” 

There is the other side of deputation work, too. 
There are the Bethany homes into which the mis- 
sionary is taken as one of the family, where she 
finds rest and refreshment of body, enjoys spir- 
itual quickening and fellowship and adds to those 
friendships that last through the years, and enrich 
life with memories of happy homes. I think no 
missionary would wish to escape the embarrass- 
ments due to such lack of courtesy as has been 
previously noted, if such escape should entail the 
foregoing of the blessings found in Bethany 
homes. I have cited some of the embarrassments, 
believing that they arise, generally, from thought- 
lessness and hoping that to mention them may add 
to the Bethany type of hospitality and courtesy. 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 109 


When in September, 1917, my sister Nettie and 
I sailed together for India, the dream of years was 
fulfilled, the desire of our heart gratified, and our 
cup of happiness full and overflowing. The years 
of our separation made us appreciate more per- 
fectly the gracious Providence that now assigned 
us to the same field of service. With Nettie at 
hand to inspire and hold me to my best, I felt able 
to do and endure anything that the years might 
bring. So I plunged into a new term of service 
resolved, under God, that it should be free from 
the mistakes that had marred my first term. 

The inauguration of a Language School, where 
our new missionaries might study the vernacular 
under more favourable circumstances than had 
heretofore been enjoyed, getting hold again of the 
cottages and class-room work, and training teach- 
ers, soon dragged me into the old rut of incessant 
work. 

Then influenza came to India, exacting a toll 
of 2,000,000 lives in about six months. On our 
school compounds fifty-three girls, teachers and 
servants were laid low. There was no doctor, no 
nurse. We bought pound bottles of bicarbonate 
of soda and salicylate of soda, which Nettie helped 
to weigh, mix and wrap the powders. None of our 
patients were lost and only one developed pneu- 
monia, although most of them ran a temperature 
of 104° and over. In the midst of the scourge, 
I noticed Nettie’s bright eyes and florid cheeks, 


110 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


so took her temperature and sent her to bed with 
fever of 102.6°. For some time before Nettie had 
been troubled with a cough which the doctors at- 
tributed to acclimation. There was so much to 
be done that Nettie got up before she should have. 
The cough persisted and strength did not return. 
This was at Christmas, 1918. 


The following letters I wrote to my sister 
Bertha, in the ensuing year: 


Eden Bari, Mongaldai, Assam, 
19th January, 1919. 
Dear Bertha: 

From “ Satribari,” you know that “ bari ”’ means 
garden, so you may gather from the above that I 
am in the Garden of Eden! It is a village of 
Kacharis on the north bank of the Brahmaputra 
River, and has been Christian for about four 
years. The men seem to be unusually earnest in 
matters of religion and of good calibre generally. 
The women are in comparison with their men on 
about a par with the Garo women as compared 
with Garo men. . 

I have just come from church. There were 
about eighty or one hundred present. . . . The 
only woman who could read was one of their girls 
who came with me from the boarding school... . . 
The men assemble quietly and sit reverently dur- 
ing the entire service. But in the middle of a 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 111 


hymn the women come up to shake hands with 
me and present a couple of eggs. Throughout the 
service they come and go, talk to one another and 
scold their children, just as they please. . . . The 
women have had no leader or helper, and how 
sadly they need one. We came over here to see 
about buying the year’s supply of rice for the 
boarding school, and I came also to spy out the 
land, because after this year I am hoping to be 
able to leave school-work and do evangelistic work. 
So I want to see what the fields and needs are. 
I wish that it were the beginning of my first term 
rather than my second and that I had the Kachari 
as well as the Assamese language, and several lives 
to live instead of one. I don’t know yet just how 
a missionary could get hold of these women to 
help them, but there must be a way since there is 
such a crying need. The women and children are 
so poorly dressed, so untidy and filthy, so poor and 
aged for their years. The mother of one of my 
girls looks as old as an octogenarian, and yet she 
has a daughter only about eleven and the pastor 
says that she is “a very old woman, about forty- 
five or fifty!’ So I suppose she isn’t nearly as 
old as she is aged. 

In spite of what they lack, there is a great dii- 
ference between these Christian Kacharis and 
their non-Christian neighbours. . . . Just now 
they are harvesting their rice. This morning 
when the church bell rang and we walked to 


112 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


church we passed the people from neighbouring 
heathen villages, some bringing in sheaves, some 
cutting in the fields and others driving oxen to 
tread out the grain. I realized then as I never had 
before that observing the Sabbath is hard for these 
poor farmers in the harvest season when every 
day’s labour counts for so much and no extra 
help is procurable. . 

I am staying in the preacher’s house. . . . There 
are some twenty people in his establishment with 
a dozen or so houses for his family, help, office, 
grain and cattle. . . . I am occupying the office. 

. . There is a bed of four good planks on legs, 
a table with a red oilcloth full of pictures. There 
are two good chairs and a bench in the room, be- 
side another bed made out of empty Singer sew- 
ing machine boxes. Under this bed they must 
have put all the rubbish from under the bed pre- 
pared for me, for my bed is clean underneath, but 
the Singer sewing machine bed looks like a rag and 
old clothes’ picker’s cart. . . . Just now they have 
brought in my morning rice in a beautiful chased 
bellmetal dish, water in a bright brass lota, and a 
brass basin in which to wash my hands. . 
Getting a bath has been the greatest difficulty. 
They watch me so all day, particularly the chil- 
dren, even opening the door when I have shut it, 
and peeping in through the bamboo windows. So 
last night when I knew that all the men and boys 
were in a meeting and the women and girls were 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 113 


asleep, I went out to the little mountain stream 
that flows beside the house, and had a bath in my 
kimono just at midnight, getting so cold through 
to the marrow of my bones that I didn’t get warm 
enough to go to sleep the rest of the night. . 

Different villagers bring us chickens, fruit and 
eggs, saying that they have neither table, chair nor 
brass vessels in their poor homes and that they do 
not know how to cook curry for a European to eat, 
but they want to entertain us, so send these things 
to the preacher’s house. 

. Nettie’s cold is still bad. Just before we 
came here, I called the civil surgeon in to examine 
her. He found nothing wrong, but prescribed 
rest, cod-liver oil, a tonic and something with 
which to rub her chest and back. He thought she 
would be well in four or five days. . . . Dr. Cro- 
zier is going to pass through next week on his way 
to meet Mrs. Crozier. I’m writing him today 
asking him to stop over a day and give Nettie a 
thorough examination. . . . The phase that I do 
not like is a frequent rise in temperature towards 
evening, but some evenings she is normal, so I 
hope the temperature may be malaria. . 


16th March, 1919. 
Dear Father: 
. . . We’ve made quite a number of acquisi- 
tions to our household during the last fortnight. 
First came a cow and her calf. The cow gives a 


114 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


quart of milk a day, and sometimes less; usually 
less since we have had her, although the man from 
whom we bought her assured us that it would 
usually be more. We want to get a couple more 
cows now, so as to be supplied with sufficient milk 


for our babies. . . . We’ve also bought a cart and 
pair of oxen. But the most exciting purchase of 
all is a pony. . . . He’s destined for Eden Bari, 


the villages thereabout and for the Garo villages 
in our district, when I am released for evangelistic 
work. I paid only sixty rupees for him and five 
rupees to the coachman for driving the bargain. 
He is from Manipur, the original home of polo. 
. . . Up to the time we purchased him, he is sup- 
posed never to have been fed or watered but to 
have depended upon his own efforts to get food 
from the jungle. Neither had he been shod or 
clipped. He was as nervous and frightened at a 
bucket as he could possibly have been at a loaded 
motor-truck; he was shy of my hand, as suspicious 
of his first taste of grain and as tremblingly timid 
about eating from a box, as the worst country 
codger could be at the most elaborately laid ban- 
quet table in a princely banquet-hall. But he 
hasn’t been long getting used to the ways of civil- 
ization. He stood having his hair cut very well 
until they tried to clip under his head and about 
his feet. He must have thought that therein lay 
the source of his strength, for he did the most won- 
derful feats of feet, whenever they diplomati- 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 115 


cally approached any of his extremities with the 
shears. . . . 
. . Nettie’s cough seems a little better. . 


April 5, 1919. 

. . . About ten days ago we had a death in the 
boarding department. It was Anoograu, the little 
baby we took from the hospital when her mother 
died of pneumonia. I think I wrote you that she 
had fits and a skin disease when we first took her. 
Her head was one great scab, and her hands and 
arms became so covered with ulcerated sores that 
we had to keep them in bags. And yet, she was 
always so good, so happy and bewitching that 
everybody loved her. The fits became less and 
less frequent. . . . She was having a hard time 
teething, so I took her to the Government hospital 
Monday and had her gums cut. She seemed 
better, only rather drowsy, and Wednesday morn- 
ing the matron called me to see the child and I 
found her in a state of coma. I sent for the 
doctor immediately and we worked over her until 
she came. . . . She lifted the baby from her cradle 
on the floor to a high bed and the heart stopped 
while the child was being lifted. We banked a 
box with beautiful blossoms very like our lilacs 
only with lacey leaves, and we put the little form 
in the mass of blossoms. She looked as though 
she had fallen asleep in a garden. . . . The little 
thing evidently had a sad heritage, so it may be 


116 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


well that she slipped away as she did, but she was 
one of the dearest babies I have known, of any 
colour whatsoever. . . . It is the first baby I’ve 
lost; for the little tea-garden baby we had we took 
to bury, really, for we knew that it was dying 
when we received it. 

Just now I am keeping Birsi, the little Lakim- 
pur baby, in my room. She has had dysentery 
several times. I would keep her in my room until 
she seemed cured, then send her back to the dor- 
mitory, when the disease would develop again. As 
the child is only a skeleton with an enormous 
spleen from constant fever, I don’t dare run any 
risks with her. Then, too, we think she has kala- 
zhar, which is very contagious, so we want to safe- 
guard the other babies. In the bungalow she has 
become a new child: happy, chatty, and playful. 
Before she had smiles for no one and the girls 
thought her a dunce. When I am working at my 
desk or about my bedroom I keep her on a cushion 
in a big chair and talk mother’s nonsense with her 
as I have time. She talks back and gurgles with 
joy and excitement. Just now as I write, she is 
sleeping soundly on my lap. This is the part of 
the work that I love and for which I know I 
have gifts and skill, but the part for which I 
have to steal time from school work. . . . The 
missionaries are convinced that I was born to teach 
school. . . . I’d rather look after a half-dozen 
babies and sick folk and help them to live, to love 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 117 


to live and to help other folk to love to live, than 
I would to be the most successful teacher of the 
largest school in India. But then, that is nothing 
to bother you with. 

Nettie’s cough is bad again. I’m begging her 
to go down to Calcutta next week with Mr. and 
Mrs. Stephen and enter a hospital where she can 
be under constant watch care and have someone 
find out just where this cough is seated and how 
to unseat it. . . 


Calcutta, 
Sunday (I think it’s the 
5th of May), 1919. 
My Dear Family: 

I wonder if within this generation means of 
communication will become so perfected that sit- 
ting here in Calcutta I may speak with you in 
Washington. . . . There is much that I would 
like to talk about tonight—things I’d like to dis- 
cuss. But since discussion is out of the question, 
I can only ask the Great Father to give needed 
guidance and wisdom, believing that you, too, will 
be asking this same blessing for us and so through 
prayer we may be drawn closer together. 

You'll probably be surprised to see this letter 
dated Calcutta. Last Saturday I had a letter from 
Mrs. Stephen to the effect that Nettie was having 
a daily temperature of 101°, was losing weight, 
and evidently longing to get home, since she knew 


118 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


that she must go. . . . I decided immediately to 
leave on the mail train Monday. . . . 1 am more 
than glad that I came since everybody seems to 
think that Nettie is much brighter. And I have 
been able to secure sailings for both of us on the 
Santa Cruz, a Pacific Mail steamer, due to sail 
from Calcutta direct to San Francisco the 20th 
of May. 

From my last letter you will know that Nettie 
has tuberculosis. I had hoped that it might still 
be incipient, but it has advanced beyond the first 
stage. . . . I wish we might be getting away long 
before the twentieth, but we are really very for- 
tunate to have secured passage via the Pacific even 
as early as this. . . . At first they could give us 
no berths and no hopes of securing berths, but I 
would not take “No” for an answer. Every time 
I came away from the hospital it was with the con- 
viction that we must get away on this steamer. 
When I came home from the hospital Friday night 
Mr. Stephen brought me a huge pile of mail and 
said he thought I would like to glance through 
them as one seemed to be from the steamer com- 
pany. And so it was—promising us two berths! 

. Nettie is down to eighty-three pounds. 
She has no pain but a daily temperature and is 
very weak. I wanted to take her for a drive and 
thought taking her to have her passport pictures 
taken was a splendid excuse for getting her away. 
But the Sister wouldn’t hear of her going out in 





“SISTER NETTIE?— 
On the eve of sailing for Assam 


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ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 119 


a Carriage, or in fact, of her going out in any way. 
She said that Nettie was far too weak for such 
excursions. . . . I’ll be glad when she becomes my 
patient. The Sister is very nice to her, and so in 
fact everybody is,—they can’t help but be, for 
Nettie is such an appreciative patient, but it is a 
big ward and there are many to care for, so none 
can have all done for them that an individual nurse 
would do for a single patient. Since coming down 
here, I’ve again begged Nettie to go into a private 
room, but she won’t listen to it; she says she much 
prefers staying out on the veranda. She is brave 
and happy, as all who know her, would expect her 
to be. . . . Everybody has been unspeakably 
kind. I’m sure we have had a hundred letters in 
the last ten days or so, with loving offers of service 
and expressions of sympathy and encouragement. 

. . Recently I have been hearing of wonderful 
T. B. cures which have been effected out West and 
I am hoping that Nettie’s case will be another won- 
derful cure that people may soon be citing to 
others upon whom the dread disease has a hold. 

. . I am confident that Nettie is not worrying 
about herself at all—her mind and heart are too 
full of all the beautiful things with which she has 
been enriching them these many years. And I 
cannot, I will not, consider anything but a com- 
plete recovery for her. Too many little children 
need her loving motherly training, sincerity and 


120 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


simplicity; and my impetuosity needs the balance 
of her sensible sanity. It is true, she is quite fit 
to be called up higher, but I believe God will let 
her stay yet a while longer with us, that we may 
share her fitness. 


25th May, 1919. 
Dear Home-folk: 

You see we are really started and all promises 
well for Nettie. . . . The wonderful providences 
that have marked all our way, still attend us. . . 
Nettie’s nurse is engaged to one of the river pilots. 
He arranged for Nettie to get on board the 
steamer at one-thirty today, before anyone else 
was around and early enough to be well rested be- 
fore her medical exam. Then the two young 
Americans in the passenger office wrote the Purser, 
asking that Nettie be vouchsafed every possible 
comfort. . . . There is a very nice Stewardess on 
board. We have been put just opposite the ladies’ 
bath and near the ship’s doctor. . . . There is a 
nice lot of passengers on board. . . . It is good to 
look out and see Old Glory flying in the breeze. 

. . Nettie wants me to tell you how fine she is 
and how full of promise everything is. And just 
now things do seem more promising than they 
have for weeks. Nettie lost a pound and a half 
last week, but I suppose everybody in Calcutta 
lost this much in the heat. Do not worry about 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE i121 


her. . . . The pilot will carry this back to Cal- 
cutta to mail... . 


It was too late to avert disaster. For more than 
a week on the voyage home we were prepared to 
bury Nettie at sea. But an indomitable will rallied 
fagging strength so that she was able, with assist- 
ance, to walk from the steamer to the dock when 
we reached San Francisco. For more than a year 
Nettie suffered, glorified God, and with increased 
power supplemented the lessons of faith and love 
that through the years she had been teaching her 
sister-friend. 

Her going away is one of the dark mysteries, 
for light upon which we must wait “ until the day- 
break and the shadows flee away.” In her short 
term of service in India, she had made herself very 
useful and greatly loved. Scholars and servants 
alike testified that her use of Assamese was more 
idiomatic and perfect in the ears of the Assamese, 
than had been acquired by any other European 
except Mr. Moore. This achievement is the more 
remarkable in view of the fact that Nettie had 
received no linguistic training and was thirty-one 
years old when she began her language work. It 
may be partly accounted for by the fact that her 
mentality was above the average and because she 
put hours of concentrated study upon the lan- 
guage. Since some others have spent more hours 
with not as good results, I am inclined to attribute 


122 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Nettie’s success in language work more to the fact 
that, conscious of her lack of training for such 
study, she very definitely depended upon God’s 
help and worked prayerfully with her books and 
pundits. 

She was peculiarly a chosen vessel of honor, 
sanctified and meet for the Master’s use; she 
seemed not to need the purging of suffering. Euro- 
pean and character-discerning Indian alike, were 
impressed with her innate goodness. One would 
have supposed her destined for long years of ser- 
vice in the place of great need to which she had 
been sent. Why, then, was she given but a year 
and a half? And why did she have to supplement 
this with more than a year of suffering? Since her 
going away I have thought much about these 
things. Inasmuch as with the Lord one of her 
days of perfect service may be as a thousand 
years, she may have served longer than we ken. 
And her suffering? 


“We suffer. Why we suffer,—that is hid 
With God's foreknowledge in the clouds of heaven.” 


She was content ‘to set ‘her’ soul to suffer per- 
fectly ” and not to question “ why.” Never once 
in all those months, so far as I know, did her faith 
falter. In no part of her life was she a greater 
blessing than in those last months of her suffering. 

Surely in some way impossible of our under- 
standing here and now, God must, in the taking of 


ON FURLOUGH—MY SISTER NETTIE 123 


such souls to Himself, be exercising the same 
divine love and wisdom, the same matchless 
economy, that all His revealed dealings proclaim. 

After Nettie went Home, God allowed me some 
training in the school of trial and perplexity. I 
found myself drawn into the intimacies of heart- 
and-home secrets of others. I battled anew with 
the mystery of sorrow, disappointment and trag- 
edy. I saw the principles of Jesus Christ applied 
to broken hearts and lives, result in their healing; 
I witnessed Christ’s precepts of love and forgive- 
ness speak peace to domestic storms and repair the 
havoc of home tragedies; I watched men and 
women who had suffered the loss of that which in 
the secret, sacred places of the heart they most 
cherished, come up from the valley of the shadows 
of sorrow with peace marked on the battle-ground 
of their faces, as they went forth forgetting self 
in serving others. Pain and sorrow are still mys- 
teries, but I know that Christ sheds a light upon 
them that brings strength out of struggle, and 
peace out of storm. I know, also, that this light 
in the darkness, has come and can come from no 
other source than Christ. 

It was then that I saw the mud walls of Indian 
huts crumble away and within I saw my brown 
friends without God and without hope in the world, 
blind and in Christless darkness, grope for light 
as they, too, lifted empty arms while the hungry 
heart cried, ‘‘ Where? ” and the weary mind asked 


124 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


“Why?” Mocked by disappointed hopes, and 
tragic denials, I saw other brown friends question 
why it had to be and ask how they could go on 
after defeat. So with a more sympathetic com- 
passion for India’s unshepherded sheep and a more 
understanding love, I sailed the third time for 
Assam, to help Christ “ give light to them that sit 
in darkness, and in the shadow of death, to guide 
their feet into the way of peace.” 


Vil 
CARRYING ON 


trip out into the district, forty to sixty miles 

from Gauhati, where our Christian villages 
are hidden in bamboo clumps beside rivers. All 
the three days’ journey back from the jungle to 
the station, I was building a little “ house by the 
side of the road’ somewhere in the district near 
a bazaar center, planting gardens around it and 
peopling it with throngs of sick brown people com- 
ing for medicines, ignorant ones coming for books 
and learning, mothers coming with babies to learn 
how best to nourish and care for them, and sin- 
ning, sorrowing men and women coming to find the 
Saviour. All the years I spent in school-work were 
hounded by the vision of this house by the side of 
the road, and every trip to the jungle afforded new 
details for the dream house and the work to be 
done by it. 

Friends and different organizations in my home 
church gave me a purse of five hundred dollars be- 
fore I returned to Assam, and this helped interpret 
the dream into reality. While seeking out a loca- 
tion for the camp-house, I did evangelistic work 
in and around Gauhati, and helped put into shape 

125 


I was in February, 1914, that I had my first 


126 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


the second year’s course of language study for new 
missionaries. In February, I attended the Kam- 
rup Garo Christian Association and wrote the fol- 
lowing letters to my Mother and the folks at home: 


Gauhati, Assam, India, 
Feb., 1922. 
Dear Mother-mine: 

. I want to warn you not to be concerned 
if you do not get mail from me very regularly 
these next few months. Sometimes I will not be 
within reach of a post-office when the weekly mail 
goes out. Sometimes I'll be on the north bank, 
and sometimes up in the hills on this side of the 
river. . . . Neither be worried because of any- 
thing you may chance to see in the papers. Things 
have been somewhat disturbed around Assam, but 
we all believe that the situation is much better 
than it was and are confident that the British 
Government can handle it. In accordance with 
Gandhi’s gospel of non-codperation, the people 
hereabouts refused to pay taxes and looted carts, 
ostensibly to confiscate and destroy any foreign 
goods they might be conveying. So the Govern- 
ment had to send an officer with several hundred 
sepoys to collect taxes. The soldiers are stationed 
at Boko, the people are paying their taxes and 
“‘swaraj”’ seems as unattainable today as it was 
several years ago when Gandhi inaugurated his 
crusade and slogan. . 


CARRYING ON 127 


Personally, I feel perfectly safe and wondrously 
happy—happy as I imagine birds are when on 
the wing. I am positive that I am in God’s place 
for me and am expecting His blessing on the work 
out here in the district. Let me tell you of an 
experience of His wonderful answer to prayer. 
Thursday I walked ten miles with the girls in the 
hottest part of the day on a dusty, shadeless road. 
Then the motor car that had carried the rest on, 
came back and picked us up for the next twenty- 
five miles or so. It had engine trouble, so we were 
delayed. It was dusk when we reached the end 
of the road where we had to leave the motor and 
walk the last five miles through a jungle. This 
jungle is a forest reserve and is so dense that it 
is dusk even in daylight. So it was very dark 
shortly after we entered it. There was a good 
moon that pierced the dark with darts of light. 
Much of the way a mountain stream was the only 
path, so there was nothing to do but take off shoes 
and stockings and splash in the water. It was 
gratefully cold to our tired feet, but oh, the stones 
and pebbles! The girls didn’t mind them at all for 
they are always barefooted and the soles of their 
feet are like leather. After about a mile of this 
sort of travel, we came out upon an open space 
and after a bit were fronted with two paths. 
The two girls who were most familiar with that 
section decided that the upper path was the right 
one. We followed it some distance when again we 


128 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


were confronted with two paths. By this time the 
girls admitted that they didn’t know the way. It 
was about seven-thirty. We had been on the road 
twelve hours and had eaten nothing since early 
morning. So the girls were beginning to get 
panicky,—and no wonder, for they knew that 
about three weeks before, while burning the jungle 
just a mile or two away, two men had been killed 
by a tiger. 

Then we remembered “‘ from whence cometh our 
help,” so knelt there on the hill and asked God to 
direct our path. While we were yet rising from 
our knees the sharp report of a gun came along 
the direction of the lower path. We knew that 
the gun had been shot in the village for which we 
were bound, for every evening of the Association 
they give this sign when about to close the Asso- 
ciation storehouse. So does God hear and answer 
prayer. Singing “He Leadeth Me,” and ‘“ What 
a Wonderful Saviour,” we retraced our steps and 
were soon in camp. With such a God to care for 
us, surely we have no need to fear one for the 
other. . 


On the north bank of the Brahmaputra River 
was a new Christian community of Kacharis, num- 
bering nearly one thousand. The women had be- 
come Christians because the men of their house- 
hold had adopted the new faith, but they had only 
a negative knowledge of the religion they pro- 


CARRYING ON 129 


fessed. They knew that Christians are supposed 
not to beat their wives and are not allowed more 
than one wife; they are not allowed to worship 
idols; they must not make or drink beer, toddy, 
or other intoxicants, and are not permitted to work 
or to buy and sell on Sunday. Around their nega- 
tive concept of Christianity had gradually grown 
up ideas of schools and books, church and hym- 
nals, more clothing (particularly shoes), and the 
substitution of repeated awkward handshakes for 
their own graceful salaam, as a greeting. None 
of the mothers could read or write, and knew little 
or nothing of the doctrine they were supposed to 
adorn. During the five years that their own field- 
missionary had been in America, this great group 
of earnest, ignorant young Christians had but one 
or two brief visits annually from a missionary from 
another field and no work had been undertaken for 
the women. 

In the midst of this community there was a vil- 
lage that in its non-Christian state had been known 
as “ Gahorigaon,” or “ The Village of Swine,” be- 
cause of the numbers of hogs that wallowed in mire 
around most of the mud houses. After becoming 
Christians, the men of Gahorigaon wanted a new 
name for their village. They went to their Bibles 
and read about a garden that the Lord God 
planted, where grew every tree that is pleasant to 
the sight, and good for food, and a river went out 
to water the garden. It seemed a description of 


130 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


their own village minus the hogs, so they did away 
with the swine, built a church for the tree of life 
and a school for the tree of knowledge, and 
called their village “‘ Edenbari,”—“ bari ” meaning 
garden. 

After I had planned to build my house by the 
side of the road in this Garden of Eden, word was 
received that the missionary who had previously 
worked the field was returning shortly, but with- 
out his wife, who was staying in the States with 
their little girl. So it would have been unwise for 
a single woman to live in the same community, 
hence the house had to be located on the south 
bank of the Brahmaputra River. After several 
other sites had been selected and for one and an- 
other reason had to be given up, upon the advice 
of a government official the house by the side of 
the road was finally located at Hahim Depot, at 
the foot of the Khasi Hills. 


On the Train Going to Jorhat, 
Feb. 18, 1922. 

Where shall I begin? There is so much to write 
that the end will not be for some pages. . . . That 
was a happy, happy week incamp. I walked about 
fifty-five miles and some of it in the heat of the 
day, and seem none the worse for the exercise, so 
you may know that I am in excellent physical trim. 

The Association closed Sunday night. . . . After. 
we reached the second rest-house, coming back to 


CARRYING ON 131 


Gauhati, Isabella* and I went out to speak to some 
children and distribute picture-cards amongst them. 
As usual out in the district, the children were 
afraid to receive them at first but after one ven- 
turesome spirit dared to take the card into her 
hand, little ones sprang up from hedges, houses 
and ditches, and mothers came asking for cards for 
absent children. We went to bed early, setting the 
alarm for twenty minutes of four and leaving tea 
in the thermos bottles for a bit of breakfast before 
‘starting out in the morning. We slept together on 
a wee single bed, so as to use some of our blankets 
for a mattress over the metal springs. The next 
‘morning we . . . started from the rest-house at a 
quarter of five—the moonlight very bright and the 
morning stars shining as brightly as the nearly full 
moon would let them. Rhonji had to stay back 
with the baggage to wait for the ox-cart that was 
to come out from Gauhati. . . . So I slung a 
‘thermos bottle of malted milk across one shoulder 
and carried my topi-strap slung on the other arm 
with the topi hanging down and making a pocket 
for my revolver which had all six chambers loaded 
in case we should meet with something along the 
road. The air was fresh and chilly. We had 
twelve miles to walk before quarter of nine, in 
order to catch the public motor car that runs from 
Palishbari to Gauhati. At first it was difficult to 
read the numbers on the mile stones, but after 


* Miss Wilson, my Gauhati colleague. 


132 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


dawn we found that we did three miles an hour 
steadily. . . 

The morning we got into Gauhati, Mr. Stephen 
called to say that the Jungakoli bungalow which 
we hoped to buy from the Forest Department for 
my camp-house, is not for sale now. I felt he 
must have made a mistake for the place seems so 
ideal for our purpose that I thought it had to be 
mine. When I recovered from the shock of sur- 
prise, I clung desperately to the faith that God had 
something better in store, although I couldn’t see 
what could be better. When the Forest Officer 
heard that I wanted one room for medicines and 
sick folks, he told Mr. Stephen to bring me along 
to have a talk with him. We went that afternoon 
and he said that if my little house was to be part 
hospital or dispensary, he was quite sure he could 
get me a grant of land and timber! Of course 
the words “hospital and dispensary” took my 
breath away and I hastened to explain that I was 
not qualified to run a hospital or dispensary but 
planned to stock simple remedies for fever, dysen- 
tery, running sores, sore eyes, etc., and to have 
two cots for some sick women or children that 
might be in need of a little careful nursing. I was 
told, however, that the experience I have had with 
the school children has probably qualified me bet- 
ter than I think. It seems the Government wants 
to establish little dispensaries around through the 
isolated villages, but cannot afford to do so. They 


} 
CARRYING ON 133 


particularly want me to give Kalazhar treatments. 
This is a wasting fever very much like T. B. It 
has decimated whole sections of Assam and caused 
the people to abandon numbers of villages. The 
theory is that the germ is carried by bedbugs. 
The disease is being successfully treated by venous 
injections. . . . It is saving many lives. 

I plan to have Scripture texts painted on the 
dispensary walls and pictures of Christ as the great 
Physician and Comforter. We'll have a little Gos- 
pel talk and hymn every day. The Tuttles think 
it a wonderful opportunity and so do the others. 

. . When I went to advise with Mr. and Mrs. 
Tuttle, they gave me the wonderful news that a 
cable had just come from home, “ Five hundred 
dollars gold for Holmes at present rate of ex- 
change.” I’m sure that you sent it. So wonder- 
fully, wonderfully, does God time His provisions 
according to our need. . . . Who but God could 
have done this? For a lack of additional funds for 
the house seemed to be the chief drawback to this 
new plan, but I told Ethel that if we really needed 
more money, God would send it down from above 
or in from around, or up from below, but it would 
be here when needed. And here it is! And here 
I raise another Ebenezer! You can imagine with 
what joy and gratitude and reverence I went back 
into the district with Augusta the next day to spy 
out the land. It is beautifully situated, of which 
more later. Two Christian households have set- 


134 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


tled in the village. The wife in one house is one 
of our old girls, Mohini. There are a considerable 
number of Nepalese in the village, and within a 
few miles there are dozens of villages of Garos, 
Rabhas, Kacharis, etc., who have never heard the 
Gospel. And there are populous Assamese villages 
within easy reach by motor, where Christ has 
never been lifted up. So the place seems a good 
working base. 


March 19, 1922. 
Dear Home-folk: 

I took twelve exposures of a Premo pack to help 
you visualize in what a very pleasant place the 
lines are fallen unto me and amongst what an in- 
teresting lot of folks I am to live. And here the 
whole pack of films melted! So I’ll have to do the 
best I can with some word sketches. 

Hahim is beautifully situated. The morning 
sun creeps up over low wooded hills and drops at 
night between two ranges of higher hills. I call 
these western hills my letter-box, because in the 
evening Sol is a postman charged with loving mes- 
sages for you at home. The western hills are 
beautiful with great clumps of bamboos like friends 
waving plumed hats in greeting. At night the Lit- 
tle Bear dips his tail into the valley between two 
ranges and the southern stars saddle higher hills 
closer. From these southern hills a mountain stream 
of considerable force winds a serpentine course 


CARRYING ON 135 


around the west and is lost in the valley where the 
tail of the Little Bear dips low. The evening skies 
are very beautiful here just now at the end of the 
long dry season. My neighbours have grouped 
these stars in an order handed down from long 
generations of forefathers who spent many nights 
every harvest in their little shelters in tree tops, 
keeping watch with the stars over their crops and 
guarding them from the ravages of wild beasts. 
The other night I pointed out different constella- 
tions and most of the boys and girls seemed 
familiar with their Garo names and the Garo fables 
behind the names. 

After the long, dry season everything is parched 
and brittle. The ground rustles with fallen leaves, 
the fields and hillsides are brown with parched 
growth and black with the cinders of burnt jungle. 
The river has shrivelled into a harmless stream, 
scarcely waist-deep, with wide stretches of rocks 
and sand on its naked beaches. It is about two 
o’clock as I write, and the third week in March, 
but the heat is the heat of midsummer. Our little 
pup is panting in the shade on the cool, mud floor 
by the open door; the chickens are standing in the 
shade with open mouths, gasping for breath. I 
doubt if even a “ big, fat, woolly one ” would tempt 
them to run even a short distance in this sun. 
They have been burning jungle all about us; the 
air is heavy with smoke; bits of burned leaf are 
falling everywhere; we can hear the sharp report 


136 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


of bursting bamboo and occasionally the roar of 
consuming fire. In another three months the pic- 
ture will be quite different. Then the earth will 
be clothed in soft, rich greens and the rocks and 
sand of the riverside will be buried in a strong, 
swift current that will flood the lowlands, sing the 
song of rushing waters night and day, and raise a 
gulf between the peoples on its two banks. . . 

I often change my mind about the most fascinat- 
ing children, because so many are fascinating. I 
have almost decided definitely, however, that 
Nepali children are the cream of winsomeness. 
They are so spontaneous, have the sweetest piping 
baby voices, and the longest, most grown-up style 
of clothes. I took the picture of a little Nepali boy 
and girl for you. These little ones are not Chris- 
tians, but were at Sunday school last Sunday and 
we became friends. The next day when I hunted 
them down for their pictures the mother of the 
little girl yanked her away and insisted upon dress- 
ing her proudly in all her best things and in some 
of the mother’s best things, too. Little girls wear 
shawls over their heads, little basque waists, and 
skirts that just escape the ground. So they look 
for all the world like little old women or as though 
they were playing dress-up. This girlie had a 
green-and-red silk shawl, a red-and-pink basque 
with a big necklace of silver coins outside it, and 
a voluminous skirt of yellow flowers on a brown 
background. She had bangles and anklets and ear- 


CARRYING ON 137 


rings and a nose-ring. The little boy wore flow- 
ing trousers down to his ankles and over it a white 
shirt with a long, long tail hanging outside. Add 
round baby faces with large brown eyes, heavy 
black lashes, skin of soft tan, chubby baby hands 
and feet, and even then you won’t begin to have 
an idea how fetching the youngsters are until you 
have fallen under the spell of their baby voices. 
These Nepalese used to work in a corundum 
mine twenty miles back in the hills, but the mine 
has been abandoned. Now the men gamble with 
cards all day and most of the night, except when 
they are quarrelling over the cards. Some of the 
women keep little shops, for this is a big market 
center. . . . People come from twenty miles back 
in the hills to buy and sell here. They begin to 
arrive Sunday at sunset. The Khasas with their 
goods carried in a basket-chair peculiar to their 
tribe; the women usually very heavily dressed, the 
men often wearing just a loin curtain. Garos come 
with their wares in another kind of basket. 
Amongst non-Christian Garos, men and women 
both are generally scantily clad. . . . And there 
are the Nepalese with yards and yards of cloth in 
the women’s skirts and the men with pajamas to 
the ankles. They camp in the open fields and on 
the banks of the river, always with a fire... . 
Monday morning the bazaar opens under little 
thatch roofs beneath which the people sit on the 
ground with their wares around them—betel-nuts, 


138 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


rice, potatoes, onions, fish, salt, spices, candy, oil,. 
notions, cloth, soap, pottery and cattle. Most of 
the small produce is arranged in little pice piles. 
A pice is half-a-cent. All day the crowd changes. 
Some stay for the two days; some sell their goods 
and return home Monday. New people arrive 
Monday afternoon and the bazaar sits again Tues- 
day until afternoon. ‘These two days are our 
harvest days. We play the graphophone and use 
the magic lantern. Sometimes we have an audi- 
ence of several hundred out under the stars. They 
are very fond of the laughing songs and of the 
American Indian songs with drums. We always 
close with a hymn; very often it is, “ Joy to the 
World” or “ Nearer My God, to Thee.” Then 
we tell them the old story of Jesus having come 
to save us from our sins and crown our lives with 
peace and joy. 

Already we have had a number of calls to care 
for ulcers and sores, and oh, the babies and chil- 
dren that are burning with fever and have skeleton 
bodies and huge spleens! So many, many women 
say, “‘ This is the only child I have left; the others 
have died of fever.”” And other women of wistful 
face say, “‘ I had sons and daughters, but they all 
died.” Some of the men told me that they consider 
themselves very fortunate if they are able to raise 
half of their children to reach their teens. I know 
that there are many, many needs that I will not be 
able to meet, but I know, too, that there are many 


CARRYING ON 1389 


ways in which I can help save babies for their 
mothers and some souls for their Saviour. Since 
you know how I love nursing you will not wonder 
that I am glad to be here. . 

“ Nengtakram,” the Garo name for my home, 
means ‘ Rest-Haven.” That is what I want it to 
become for many weary ones. Pray that God‘may 
bless my contact with these people to His glory 
and their salvation. . 


For two months I lived in a wee shack without 
windows, but with a foot or two of open space be- 
tween the four or five feet high walls and the low 
roof of rotten thatch, finished with ancient cob- 
webs and slits through which sunshine percolated 
and stars winked. The hut had once been used as 
a cook-shed and the smoke of many fires had bur- 
nished the bamboo of the frame-work into rich 
shades of copper and brown. 


Nengiakram, 
Hahim Depot, 
Boko Post Office, 
Kamrup District, 
Assam, 
India. 
March 12, 1922. 
Dear Jack: 
Haven’t I an aspiring address? If you could 
see the house I am occupying you would see the 


140 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


necessity for an elaborate identification. It is in 
the village where I hope to have my bungalow, 
but for the present I am occupying a shelter that 
was used first as a storeroom and later as a 
chicken-house. The rats shared it when it was 
used as a granary, leaving tunnels in the dirt floor. 
These we have filled in and smeared with mud, so 
it is nice as a carpet except that it is still wet. The 
chickens resent our taking possession. We just 
moved in yesterday afternoon and one old hen 
insisted upon coming to her old haunt to lay an 
egg and all the chickens were determined to roost 
here. When we wouldn’t let them in through the 
door, one by one, they tried to “climb up some 
other way.” And they succeeded, too, for it is no 
feat for them to fly over four feet of reed wall 
through the two feet of open space above... . 
You would have enjoyed being in camp with us 
last week on the north side of the Brahmaputra, 
for the place is a net-work of mountain streams 
and fishing is good. The people fish so much with 
so many different kinds of apparati, that one won- 
ders that any fish are left. . . . You will be inter- 
ested in the crudest, least sportsman-like method 
of fishing that I saw yesterday. . . . We walked 
to a village about a mile from here and were told 
that all the men were fishing, so went down to the 
river. They call this particular form of fishing, 
“gun fishing.” They prepare an explosive, using 
sulphur mostly, I believe. They bind it in bark 








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CARRYING ON 141 


and strips of banana-stalks, then throw it with 
great force into the water where they have located 
a goodly number of fish. The force of compact 
with the water produces an explosion. The fish 
are maimed and the men catch them as they flap 
about in the water. Yesterday they had about a 
bushel of fish in their basket. . 

This afternoon we called on a Bengali gentleman 
and his household. He has two hooloos, a kind of 
monkey peculiar to Assam, I understand. They 
are black except for a ridge of white over the brow. 
As they have no tails, they use their arms for 
climbing, so have developed them to a remarkable 
length. They have a passionate fondness for men. 
They are quite tame, whine after their master, fol- 
low him about as puppies do, and cling to him as 
babies to their mothers. . . . ’m sure you would 
want one if you could have seen these this after- 
noon. . . 

This is bazaar day.. . . A great medley of folk 
are in from miles and miles back in the hills carry- 
ing their wares in baskets on their backs supported 
by straps across their foreheads. Two years ago, 
this was a very prosperous place. It was the 
Depot for corundum that was mined twenty miles 
back in the hills and brought down here for deposit 
and transportation to the river. Since the close of 
the war, the company has closed down, and I doubt 
if they start again. 


142 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


While corrugated iron for the roof of the perma- 
nent house was being brought from Calcutta and 
other building material was being sent from Jor- 
hat, I had men working on two typical Indian mud 
houses, one of which I purposed to occupy during 
the approaching rainy season when building opera- 
tions would be impossible. We staked off a space 
twenty-eight by fourteen feet, dug trenches around 
it where the eaves would carry the heavy rains, and 
threw the earth from the trenches back onto the 
house site, where it was levelled with pieces of 
wood and much walking over. Posts were put in 
the four corners and down the center for the ridge 
pole. Gangs of men went to the jungle to cut long 
reeds to use for laths for the walls, and bamboos 
for the frame-work of the roof, and for doors, beds, 
shelves, fences, etc. Thousands of bundles of tall 
thatch-grass were cut for the roof. The reeds 
were held in single straight rows by thin strips of 
green bamboo interlaced around every three or 
four reeds by two men, one on the outside of the 
house and the other inside, pushing the lacer in and 
out to each other. A similar bamboo lacer was 
used for tying thatch to the roof. The plaster was 
made by women mixing earth, cow-dung and water 
with their feet and smearing it over the reeds with 
their hands. The mud floor was smoothed and 
carpeted with layers of the same mixture made 
thin. Windows were holes cut in the walls. Out- 


CARRYING ON 143 


side, bamboo mats arranged to slide back and forth 
on bamboo poles, served as shutters. 

There were two rooms fourteen feet square. 
One was entertainment-hall, dispensary, school- 
room, prayer-room, dining-room and _ storeroom. 
The center of the room was occupied by a pedestal 
extension table that my mother had donated to the 
new home. There were two large wardrobes, full of 
medical supplies, a folding organ, a magic lantern, 
a Victrola and records. Around three sides of the 
room bamboo bench tables, built with legs buried 
in the floor, held boxes of Bibles, hymnals, tracts, 
and Gospels printed in more than a dozen lan- 
guages. There were picture rolls, cases of soap, 
sewing supplies, and provisions stored in tin boxes 
that could not keep out the weavils. From ropes 
hung from the rafters, swung a screen box that 
protected the food from flies. The other room was 
a bedroom with a folding army cot, a bamboo 
bench for a dressing table and a big bamboo bed 
designed for six children. 

One of the big purposes which from the very 
beginning, I had hoped my house might serve, was 
that it should be home for the half dozen little 
girls in Satribari that had come to us as babies, 
been legally adopted by the mission and knew no 
other life than that of the school cottages. I 
wanted my home to be the place where they might 
look forward to spending their vacations when the 
other girls go ‘‘ home.” The big bamboo bed was 


144 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


for these. Quite a number of our first boarding- 
school girls had married and were making little 
homes of their own in the villages around Hahim. 
I hoped that my presence in their midst might help 
them to incorporate into their own home life, some 
of the good things of home-making and mother- 
lore that they had learned at Satribari. 

The night before I planned to move into this 
little cottage, I invited my neighbours in for a 
prayer service. I expected about a dozen or six- 
teen people, but thirty-two men, women and chil- 
dren came, besides about six babies tied to their 
mothers’ backs. I was puzzled to know where to 
put my guests, but they solved the puzzle by re- 
ducing the pedestal table and bamboo shelves along 
the walls into uppers and lowers! One layer 
squatted underneath and another sat on the tables 
with bare legs dangling down. It was that hot 
part of the year before the rains break. There 
were three lanterns burning in the crowded room, 
but everybody was comfortable enough to stay for 
more than two hours. 

During the months in which this little place was 
home there was not a day but that some one or 
some group squatted on my mud floor and heard 
of Jesus Christ. To many of them it was an en- 
tirely new story. At night mothers with their in- 
fants tied to their backs bent over books while 
their older children gamboled about unhampered 
by clothes, and when tired of play, curled up for a 


CARRYING ON 145 


nap on the mud floor, with no more fuss than little 
kittens or pups, weary of play. 

On a dark night, a line of blazing fagots traveled 
down the opposite hills, crossed the river and 
lighted the path to my house for two villages of 
fathers, mothers and children with the village 
teacher, come to see the magic something with 
which they had heard the white woman could make 
a great light without match, cinder, or other spark. 
So I exhibited my flash-light. Others came to see 
a doll that but few of the women and girls were 
daring enough to touch. Some were attracted by 
the bait of the Victrola, the organ, plow, the mi- 
croscope, sewing lessons, medicines, and the pea- 
nuts planted in the garden. Though but few came 
just to hear of the things concerning Jesus, none 
left without hearing a word of this Saviour and 
Friend of mankind. Sometimes when the loneli- 
ness and isolation became well-nigh unbearable, it 
would have been easy to usher sufficient reasons to 
show the white feather and go back to the station. 
But close upon every acute attack of loneliness, 
God sent some message of His mindfulness and 
love, some service to render, some errand to run 
for Him. Parents brought sick children from back 
in the mountains, for medicine; a little fourteen- 
year-old zenana wife had to be helped through a 
hard siege of malaria and strengthened for the tax 
of motherhood; some needed help in their fight 


146 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


with opium; some of the Christians needed guid- 
ance along the way back to Christ. 

One night I went to bed almost persuaded by 
the indifference of Christians and non-Christians, 
that my work was a failure. Early the next morn- 
ing a Nepali woman was at the door saying that 
her husband was very ill. From all she said I 
gathered that the man must be suffering with 
cholera. Hastily packing into my Boston bag, 
Moore’s Family Medicine Book, cholera tincture, 
and other things that I thought would be needed, 
and asking the Great Physician to supply the wis- 
dom and skill I lacked, I hurried to the last bazaar 
hut, where the sick man suffered. The morning 
before he had been strong and robust, now he was 
emaciated as after a long, hard illness. It was un- 
doubtedly cholera. We had no hot-water bottles, 
but heated stones and kept constantly massaging 
the man’s cold arms and legs. Later collapse and 
hiccoughs set in, but we did not give up. At this 
stage Dr. Moore’s book called for a mustard- 
plaster at the pit of the stomach. Having no mus- 
tard, I painted with iodine. That evening when 
bulbuls and Peking sparrows were singing vespers, 
I walked in the long shadows of great rubber trees, 
to my little hut, and my heart sang with the birds 
a song of praise for the beautiful world and all 
God’s wonderful works, a song of gratitude that I 
had not run away, but had been on hand that 
morning when God needed someone to work with 


CARRYING ON 147 


Him to save, not only the Nepali cartman’s life, 
but to prevent cholera from claiming the Nepali 
bazaar settlement where men, women and children 
lived sinfully in dark, crowded quarters. 

When five of my old Satribari babies came to 
occupy my spare bed for the six weeks’ summer 
vacation, there was no more loneliness, no further 
desire to play the coward and run away. With 
them about the place “‘ Nengtakram” seemed a 
really-truly home. 

Now for some more letters sent from far-off 
Assam to “the old folks at home”: 


April 21, 1922. 
Dear Friends in Old “ Second’’*: 

“ Nengtakram!” I wonder if it sings for others 
as it does for me? It is the best Garo translation 
I can get for Rest Haven. A house and a garden 
all my own would be enough to make a singing in 
my heart, but this is more than a house and garden, 
—there is land enough to qualify for a little farm. 
. . . I got it from the Government for clearing the 
jungle off and paying for the first and second class 
trees on the place. I don’t know how many big 
trees we cut down—enough to give us a fair view 
of the stars and the hills across the river, and there 
are still a number left for shade. I’ve left a big 
rubber tree in front of the site we have chosen for 
the bungalow. 


* Second Baptist Church, Washington, D. C. 


148 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


But there is more than !and at Nengtakram. 
There is a stable with two cows, two calves, a pack- 
bull, and room for a pony when I get one. I am 
disappointed in my cows; they are supposed to be 
extra fine ones and to give two or three quarts of 
milk each, per day, but they scarcely give that 
much between them. . . . One of the little calves 
was born here on the place. She is the prettiest 
little thing; brown and silky and soft like a baby, 
and eyelashes so long that they must get all tangled 
up. I must have a pony for it is impossible to 
walk any considerable distance in this heat; then, 
too, there are so many rivers to cross and I could 
ford these most of the year on a pony. Sometimes 
there are men to carry me over pig-a-back or in a 
Queen’s Chair, but oftener I wade and have been 
in water above my hips, and this doesn’t pay. 

For beasts of burden we have two water- 
buffaloes. . . . I have much fear and no admira- 
tion for these beasts, but they seem to be able to 
work in the hot weather with less discomfort than 
oxen. They spend most of the day in the water 
and work at night. You see, Nengtakram is 
forty-seven miles from Gauhati, so forty-seven 
miles from the railroad and white people. It is 
thirty-four miles from steamer-connection and tele- 
graph and ten miles from the post-office with no 
R. F. D. service, so I depend upon the buffalo cart 
to bring me provisions. For about six months of 
the year an auto can run between here and Gau- 


CARRYING ON 149 


hati, making the trip in three or four hours. But 
during the other six months the rains make most 
of the road impassable, so if I have to get out in 
these months, I’ll have to go in the buffalo cart 
and spend three or four nights getting to Gauhati. 

There is a weekly bazaar where I buy potatoes, 
onions, rice, chickens, and usually bananas of a 
kind. I haven’t had eggs for more than a month, 
but have fixed a place for chickens so that the wild 
animals can’t get at them. Now I can bring out 
my fowls and will be well off. . . . We had been 
living here but about two weeks when the bearer 
brought me a dead cobra one morning. He had 
been awakened about midnight by his chickens 
making a fuss. He keeps a few fowls for curry 
and they sleep under his bamboo bed, When he 
lit his tiny lamp and held it under the bed, there 
was this serpent! He slashed it several times with 
his native knife, so cut part of its hooded head off. 
I measured it with the surveyor’s line and it 
stretched six foot and an inch from the tip of its 
tail to the piece of hood that was not cut off. I’m 
not going to let chickens sleep under my bed for 
I don’t know what I would do if I found a cobra 
there. 

In listing animals I mustn’t forget my dog... . 
The place seemed mighty lonesome, especially at 
night, so I advertised in a Calcutta paper for a 
dog and in answer I have the nicest little mother 
dog with a three months’ old puppy that isn’t 


150 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


nearly as nice. The mother might have posed for 
the Victor trade mark, so like is she to “‘ His Mas- 
ter’s Voice.”” When I have to leave the place she 
stands guard near the fence, and it makes a tre- 
mendous difference coming back to have her bound 
out and say in every known dog dialect that she is 
so glad to see me. Just now the puppy is eclipsed 
by five of the little ones from Satribari. They 
have come to spend the six weeks’ summer vaca- 
tion with me and they make the place seem like 
home. They are aged from nine to four years. 
Most of them I took into Satribari when they were 
babies, so they seem like my really own folk. 
When they first came we had the nicest times work- 
ing together in the garden in the early mornings 
and after sunset. Each child was the proud pos- 
sessor of a little plot of her own, in which she 
planted seed in the morning and often uprooted 
them in the evening to see what had happened to 
them during the day. They go with me to the vil- 
lages across the river to tell the wonderful story 
of Jesus and His love to those who understand 
Assamese. . . . They have been taking turns in 
sharing the general illness that is so prevalent here 
this year. 

It hasn’t been a good year for a novice like my- 
self to begin farming for the usual storms that pre- 
cede the annual rains have failed and there has 
been a great deal of heat. Twice the farmers 
planted their rice crops and the drought killed what 


CARRYING ON 151 


few sprouts came up. It has rained this morning 
. and those who have seed will plant again, but 
the grain should be three feet high now. I fear 
some will be hungry before the next crop is har- 
vested. And to think that there are streams all 
over this section that might have watered the 
parched ground. I planted some Country Gentle- 
man corn twice, but the few blades that came up 
burned. I am having more put out today. I 
wanted to teach the people to plant peanuts, for 
their diet is lacking in fats, and I think the nuts 
will grow well there. I sent to Calcutta for two 
pounds of the biggest, best peanuts to be had, for 
planting. What came are tinier than we ever see 
at home. But I planted them and gave some to 
half-a-dozen others for their gardens and they are 
doing better than anything else. In fact, out of 
nearly four dollars worth of seed I have only sev- 
eral rows of peanuts and a few sick-looking canta- 
loup plants... .I read a great, big book on 
tropical gardening and thought that I was going to 
help my farmer-friends here a whole lot. . . . As 
it is, I find that instead of my teaching farming 
to the people they are teaching it to me. And I 
don’t know but that this is the better way, for it 
gives them a closer interest in the place and brings 
them here oftener. 
It is good, too, that there has been a delay in 
building my bungalow, for scores of people come 
to this little native house, so like their own, who 


152 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


would be afraid to venture near a bungalow. You 
can’t imagine how very primitive most of my 
friends and neighbours are. A simple little doll is 
so feared by girls in their teens, who are mothers, 
that they cannot be persuaded to touch it. But 
the young men hold it in the crook of their arm 
and kiss it! This might be just to appear brave 
before their women, for the male and female of the 
species are much the same, fundamentally, all the 
world over. 

I love the nursing, especially of the children; 
and I love to have the women for Bible and sewing 
classes and to learn their letters, and I love to have 
them just come to sit with me at night, when I 
am not too busy. And I love to show them the 
wonders of the common things about us, as seen 
under my dandy little microscope. I’m more and 
more glad that I was extravagant and bought that 
microscope. ‘The whole life is a wonderful mix- 
ture of sadness and gladness,—glad that you can 
help a little bit, and sad that it is such a little help 
where there is so great need. The two disheart- 
ening things that sometimes made me feel be- 
fore the children came, that I couldn’t stand it, but 
must run away, are the low moral tone of the 
Christians and the indifference and apathy that 
seem to settle upon my visitors when I begin to 
speak of spiritual things. It is at this juncture 
often, that some one yawns and suggests that they 
be moving on. In our little Hahim church last 


CARRYING ON 153 


week they expelled one man for stealing and an- 
other for drinking. I have learned since, that two 
of those who sat in judgment upon these two and 
had their names dropped from the church roll, are 
not married although they have been living as man 
and wife for more than two years and have a dear 
little baby. Sad as this is, sadder is the fact that 
the boy concerned is the teacher in the little school 
here, and is the son of the village preacher and 
Association evangelist, in whose house the couple 
have been living these two years. And the girl is 
one of my own Satribari girls whom I have been 
holding up as a model Christian, never dreaming 
that she was not married. The thing happened 
while I was home taking care of Nettie. But I 
suppose this very condition should make me glad 
that I am here. 

Last year I found this prayer of George Mathe- 
son’s, written, I judge, about the time he wrote, 
“QO, Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go,” “ Send me 
to the hearts without a home, to the lives without 
a love, to the crowds without a compass, to the 
ranks without a refuge. Send me to the children 
whom none have blessed, to the famished whom 
none have fed, to the sick whom none have visited, 
to the demoniacs whom none have calmed, to the 
fallen whom none have lifted, to the lepers whom 
none have touched, to the bereaved whom none 
have comforted.” I made this my prayer, too, and 
Hahim Depot affords a fine opportunity for an- 


154 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


swering it. But you must all pray for me. I fear 
sometimes lest I may fail to put first things first. 
Just now the biggest task I have on hand, apart 
from trying to keep myself straight, is trying to 
help little four-year-old Birsi control her sulky 
temper. I have keen sympathy for her, remem- 
bering my temper was much the same as a child 
and not so very different now. Birsi has made con- 
siderable advance. 


Nengtakram, Hahim Depot, 
16th June, 1922, 

Dear Home-folk: 
. . School opened yesterday at Satribari and 
I took the children in in ox-carts, going consider- 
ably out of our way to attend several bazaars: 
where the children helped in evangelistic work with 
their singing and reciting of Scripture. We left 
here the sixth, traveled at night in carts, and in the 
morning put up our organ at some weekly bazaar, 
had a crowd in less time than it takes to write 
about it, the crowd grew and pressed upon us until 
I could scarcely breathe and couldn’t see to read 
the notes on the hymn book. They crowded from 
behind until many times they almost upset the 
organ. It was a little hard on the children, for 
their food was not always regular, nor was it al- 
ways good, and we were rather crowded for sleep- 
ing with seven of us and the dog in two little ox- 
carts. . . . From six market centers we touched 


CARRYING ON 155 


hundreds of people who live a whole day’s journey 
from these centers. There was some opposition in 
two places, but for the most we were graciously 
received and given a good hearing. These last two 
weeks I’ve felt more like a missionary than ever 
before. 

The new Forest Officer thought that they might 
sell the jungakoli bungalow after all. Government 
is so deeply in debt, largely due to non-codperation, 
that the Forest Department cannot keep up the 
road between here and Boko, which means that 
after a bit I will be ten miles from a road. Several 
bridges are already unusable even for ox-carts. 
Coming back from Boko yesterday morning we 
had to leave the road and take to the rice fields in 
one place because of a broken bridge, and this now 
before the heavy rains have commenced... . 

In some ways I can’t bear to think of leaving 
this place. I have my work nicely started and the 
people know me. Then there is the garden, but 
if the road is not kept up this will not be a good 
working base. . . . We are praying about it and 
have prayed about every step as we took it, so I 
know it will all come out right. 

Jononi, the old Satribari girl who was engaged 
to be married and whose father had bought the pro- 
visions for the wedding feast when the boy broke 
off the engagement because Jononi was not very 
well, has been with me for some weeks now and is 
getting strong and well. I am very happy about 


156 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


this. I think it was indigestion and resultant 
weakness. I had her on a milk diet then gradually 
put her back on rice and she is gaining steadily. 
The boy who cast her off lost a jewel of a wife and 
the making of a beautiful mother. She was so 
wisely kind with the children when I had them 
here. She is one of the finest girls Satribari has 
produced,—not brilliant as a student, but generally 
fine and helpful. . . 

The perspiration is oozing from me; my hand 
sticks to the paper and my clothes are wet. The 
dolls sent out from home had heads made of some 
sort of composition stuff. The one I keep out 
showed signs of softening of the brain before I left 
on this trip and now its head has collapsed and 
fallen from the body. You would think that it had 
spent several days in water, but it has only ab- 
sorbed the dampness in the atmosphere. My house 
is filthy from the work of insects and worms in the 
green wood. And oh, the bugs, the bugs! I want 
to cry about them, but instead I think I’ll do some 
housecleaning. My poor dog has fever all the time 
nearly, and is peppered with prickly heat and in- 
sect bites. I’m going to begin today to give her 
quinine. 


Those last ten days of the children’s vacation 
spent jogging along in ox-carts at night and work- 
ing in the bazaars during the day, were happy days 


CARRYING ON 157 


of seed-sowing for us all. We would hang our 
Bible picture rolls on a tree, set up the organ and 
begin to play hymns. Not even a musician could 
have produced music from our worn-out little box. 
But as soon as the first organ sounds fell on those 
jungle bazaars, customers stopped buying and mer- 
chants quit selling to join the crowd gathered 
around the instrument. One would have thought 
that Kriesler had come to town after having been 
widely advertised. Men and boys climbed trees 
for the advantage of box-seats from which to look 
over the rest of the audience. Parents lifted small 
children astraddle their shoulders that they might 
see over the heads of the crowds. Throngs in front 
swayed forward, tilting the organ with them; then 
those in back surged close, jamming the children 
and tilting the organ towards the front crowd. 
Somewhere sandwiched between were the children 
and I perspiring and asking for room to breathe 
as I pumped out sounds that my audience accepted 
for music. And they would remain to listen just 
as long as I would consent to play, although no- 
where in America have I been asked to play a sec- 
ond piece, for I know barely enough of notes to 
play the treble cleff stumbling with both hands, an 
octave apart. 

The same thing was true of the medical work 
I did. Every missionary in the jungle, dares in 
those places of great need, what the laws of his 


158 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


homeland wisely prohibit any other than a well 
qualified medical person to attempt. When his 
poor knowledge and skill is all that is available, 
he dares not refuse to do his best for the needs that 
are brought to him. 

The great rains broke after I returned from tak- 
ing the children back to Gauhati. Swollen streams 
destroyed many of the bridges on the ten miles 
separating us from the government cart road. 
Continued rain buried much of the country under 
water, made the river well-nigh impassable, spread 
mould on shoes, and books and through the bread. 
Insects ate the green bamboos with which the house 
was built, showering on everything under the roof 
a soft, tan powder, like flour, of which we would 
dust and sweep away two or three quarts every 
morning. The saturated atmosphere caused the 
myriad seed of the earth floor to germinate, so 
though I went to sleep at night with a perfectly 
plain carpet of brown earth, I would awaken in the 
morning to find it adorned with a design of 
“green things growing.” Mosquitoes multiplied 
and seemed not to be discouraged by the thick 
plaits of damp rice straw that we always kept 
smouldering on the floor near our ankles at night. 
Every crawling, creeping thing that had been hid- 
ing in the thatch came out boldly, now, to feast on 
insects. One evening after killing nine enormous 
spiders on the bamboo mats on the ceiling under 


CARRYING ON 159 


the thatch, we decided that it was a useless job 
and left their fellows in peace. Almost everybody 
dragged about with high temperature. Even my 
little dog was peppered with bites where her coat 
was thin, and it was pathetic to see her first shake 
with chills then pant with fever. 


VIil 
TIMES OF STRESS 


N all probability I went back to Assam before 
| I was sufficiently recovered from the strain 
of nursing Nettie, but those who knew me 
agreed that I would probably be better for throw- 
ing myself into my old work that so completely 
engrossed me. Or it may be that because it did 
so completely engross me, because I so loved doing 
all the things that filled the days and nights, that 
I failed to heed weariness and fever as I should 
have. Much of the time since my return to Assam 
I had suffered with malaria, more or less constantly, 
but took quinine regularly, so seldom had a tem- 
perature over 103 and had spent but part of two 
different days in bed. My heavy head of hair came 
out until bald spots made it necessary to have my 
head shaven. During the rainy season there was 
no barber in the bazaar, but a community razor 
was passed from house to house as needed, neigh- 
bours shaving one another. I called one of the 
young farmers of the village, showed him how 
easily a handful of hair fell from my head, and 
predicted that the bald spots would grow until no 
hair was left. Then I asked him to hunt the razor 


and shave my head as sahibs shave their face. He 
160 


TIMES OF STRESS 161 


was rather unwilling to undertake the task, and 
expressed fear that after it was all shaven and 
could not be put back, the Missahib might regret 
and blame the barber in her mind. 

When I had satisfied him that this would not be 
the case he: went to hunt the razor while I prepared 
a kettle of hot water, soap, and a basin for suds. 
With the razor the barber brought a piece of stone 
(corundum) to use asa razor strop. He questioned 
the purpose of the hot water and soap and dis- 
dained its use after I explained that I had always 
used lather on my father’s neck before shaving it. 
I think he put it down as due to the white man’s 
inexplicable fondness for soap and water, and 
thought that it would be much easier to wash my 
scalp after it was shaven! Nevertheless, after he 
had cut away the long hair I hid the rest in a thick 
lather and he proceeded. He had worked about an 
hour, stopping several times to sharpen his razor 
on the rock, but produced little of the desired 
baldness. Suddenly I remembered a packet of 
safety razor blades my father had given me to use 
for ripping in sewing classes. I found these, but 
had nothing in which to hold the blade, so he held 
it in his thick fingers and reported better progress. 
The lather had long since disappeared; the water 
was no longer hot; my head felt like a series of 
ice-bound hills and the razor an ice-saw cutting 
away chunks. 

The sun set. The bearer lit the lantern and 


162 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


brought it in. After more than two hours’ labour, 
the farmer-barber drew a long, deep breath and 
announced, “ It is finished.” Earlier in the day I 
had packed away my hand mirror, the only look- 
ing-glass in the establishment, but as I picked up 
the lantern to go into the bedroom, the strange, 
grotesque shadow of a head shaven and shorn fell 
on the mud wall and startled me so that I almost 
dropped the lantern, although it was a few seconds 
before I sensed the intimate connection between 
that shadowed head and mine. With gratitude, I 
remembered that during the four months in which 
the rains would keep me prisoner in the jungle, 
nature would do much towards repairing the dam- 
age done. 

Constant rain made touring and most outside 
work impossible, and multiplied sickness and calls 
for medicine. These weeks in the house afforded 
the coveted opportunity for studying Garo. I 
wanted a facile use of this language for the win- 
ter’s work in Garo villages. 

When I had to go away for a short trip, there 
was a new baby in the cook’s home, so I let him 
stay with his family and I started off in the buffalo 
cart with hard tack, canned fish and tea for the 
journey. Jononi was away. The last day of our 
return journey I was unable to get eggs, so had a 
can of fish for my eleven o’clock meal. I spent 
the heat of the day in the Government rest house 
and about four o’clock had a pot of tea before 


TIMES OF STRESS 163 


Starting our ten-mile ride to Hahim. The roads 
‘were fairly washed away and so lost in muck 
around broken bridges, that bullocks were not able 
to pull carts through—all were dependent on buf- 
faloes. Just before dusk, the old familiar aches 
‘began to attack my joints and gnaw along the mar- 
row of my bones. I curled up in the cart and 
asked the driver to get home as soon as possible. 
He did his best, but even buffaloes found it hard 
to pull a cart through the mire of the worst places, 
‘so it was after ten when we reached Nengtakram. 
‘My coming was unexpected, and I found two of the 
village girls sleeping nicely on the new hair mat- 
tress of my army cot. In short order they were 
sent to their homes, but from fear of what they 
‘probably left behind both from heads and bedding, 
I had the canvas cot fixed for me. 

That was a long, long night. Long before dawn 
I knew that I was suffering from more than malaria 
‘and wondered if it were cholera. The extreme heat 
and the jostling of the ox-cart had probably hurt 
the fish even though it did smell and taste all right. 
In the early morning when the cook came in, I 
‘was on the floor unable to get back in bed. His 
‘sister-in-law, who understood and spoke nothing 
but hill Garo, came in to help me. She was so 
anxious to help but neither of us could understand 
the other. I wanted a kimono from a tin trunk 
of clean clothes. Muttering the magic word, 
““ Kee-mo-no,” time after time, she roamed about 


164 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


the house, lifting boxes, looking under and in them, 
producing various articles of food, books, and 
clothing, but nothing that resembled a kimono. 
Finally the cook came in to assist. Then there 
was a duet of murmured “ Kee-mo-nos.” I was 
too weak and tired to talk much, but told the cook 
that it was a big, light blue thing like a loose frock, 
and had pictures of rice birds made on it in em- 
broidery. Grasping desperately at the last of the 
description, he hurried into the other room and re- 
turned with a hand-embroidered white tea-cloth! 
“No, no, Boy; this isn’t it! It is something I 
wear over my gown when I get ready for bed at 
night.” 

He changed his murmur to, ‘‘ Something she 
wears when she gets ready for bed at night,” and 
moved about in circles, a lost look on his perturbed 
face. His sister-in-law jabbered with him in Garo, 
beamed delighted intelligence, and hastened to get 
the big, cane rod that she had seen me slip into a 
noose to secure the door every night. If kimono 
was connected with getting ready for bed at night, 
surely this was it! I gave up the kimono quest 
and called in the waiting village leaders for whom 
I had sent. 

They were anxious that some of my kind be with 
me and wanted to send runners to bring aid from 
Gauhati, or wanted me to go to Gauhati. I was 
all but sure that I had cholera and knew that no 
one could get to Gauhati and back with help in 


TIMES OF STRESS 165 


time to be of service to me. In my condition such 
a journey was impossible for me. Because in the 
jungle death is swift, and in the rains, burial must 
be within a few hours, I had told the cook that 
I was to be wrapped in one of the bamboo mats 
taken from the ceiling, and buried on the site 
staked out for the house by the side of the road. 
As soon as I had made my funeral arrangements, 
I began to get better! Thanks to the emetine 
which I found in the varied supply of medicines 
with which clever Dr. Kirby had filled my emer- 
gency case. Although I started the emetine in the 
early morning as soon as someone came into the 
house to get the case for me, it was night before I 
could retain a tablespoon of water. 

When I was able to sit in a chair, Hindu, Ani- 
mist and Christian pooled their ingenuity and im- 
provised a conveyance designed to get me over the 
ten miles to the cart-road, for I could not have 
stood that part of the journey in a cart. Ihada 
dining-room cane-bottomed chair with side arms. 
Over these they tied high arches of lithe bamboo. 
Over this framework they secured one long strip 
of carpet-runner for hood and back, and two 
shorter strips for side-curtains—the idea being to 
afford protection from the heat of the sun and 
the damage of almost certain downpours. These 
carpet strips had laid by the side of my cot, in 
front of the dresser and under my chair at the 
table. My dog did not fancy mud floors and ap- 


166 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


propriated the three pieces of carpet for beds on 
which she shed her white hairs. Vine thongs hung 
from the bamboo framework in which to put my 
arms to rest them. More thongs tied a small piece 
of wood to the lower part of the chair, for a foot- 
rest. When the chair was ready they had me sit 
in it to try it out while they adjusted the length of 
the arm and foot rests, to suit my comfort. A 
plaited strap came from ropes tied under the chair. 
This the carrier attached to his forehead and got 
into harness while stooping, then slowly rose to his 
feet with body bent forward, the chair resting on 
his back but most of its weight on his forehead. 
The morning sun looked me in the face; my neck 
rebelled against the angle my head had to assume; 
my dog’s white hairs and the dirt from the runner 
percolated down upon me. The carpet gave me 
the feeling of being smothered and I longed to dis- 
pose of the side-curtains, but feared to offend the 
friends who had so kindly provided them. As the 
day waxed warmer and we stopped to rest and 
change carriers, I had the side carpets taken down 
and went along in greater comfort. The relief 
coolie walked in front seeking the best footing, 
and several times when the carrier sank nearly to 
his knees in muck, the relief coolie helped him out 
with the stout stick that he carried. When on 
either side of the broken bridges, the six or eight 
inch cross-beam still spanned the stream the car- 
rier walked over on this with his load rather than 


TIMES OF STRESS 167 


try to ford the stream and be sucked in the mire 
on either side. So sure-footed did I know these 
jungle-men to be, that I was not nervous when car- 
ried in this fashion in the chair, eight to twelve 
feet above a stream, on a single timber not wider 
than the carrier’s foot. 

Just before noon we finished the ten-mile jour- 
ney and I rested in the Government rest-house 
until sunset, then started the night journey in a 
hammock swung in the buffalo-cart that had been 
sent on a day before. Just as we were leaving the 
village, the Government mail-runner arrived and I 
waited to see if there was anything for me in his 
pack. They brought me a home parcel containing 
a garden apron that my little mother had made, 
and a blue gingham frock, chic and pretty with 
elaborate cross-stitching on which Bertha had 
worked warm summer evenings. Do you wonder 
that with these two precious things fresh from the 
loving hands of home folks hugged close, the night 
in the buffalo-cart was not nearly so long as I had 
expected it would be? The next afternoon Miss 
Wilson brought her Ford out to the last rest-house, 
and within an hour we made the remaining fourteen 
miles of good road—a distance that the buffaloes 
required all night to cover. Everybody in Gauhati 
was so kind, doing everything possible to get me in 
shape for the journey to the hills. Hearing the 
sound of tinkling ice against a glass, I thought I 
must be delirious, but opened my eyes to find Miss 


168 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Wilson by the bed with a glass of grape juice and 
crushed ice! She had sent a man across the river 
to meet the mail train and get the ice. When I 
was strong enough to make the journey, I went to 
dear Scotch friends in Darjeeling. The Himalayan 
cold brought out more malicious malaria, in treat- 
ing which I took fifty-seven grains of quinine in 
twenty-six hours. 


IX 
WAYSIDE MINISTRIES 


FTER two months in the hills I returned 
A to the plains looking and feeling remade, 

and eager to begin the dry season’s work 
out in the district. While in Gauhati, I met our 
mission Executive Committee. With the Finance 
Committee, they had worked prayerfully, carefully 
and strenuously, trying to make appropriations cut 
twenty-five per cent, meet old needs as well as 
cover the expenses of new work, such as Miss Wil- 
son’s Home for Widows and Orphans, and my work 
in the district. Apart from my salary, I was al- 
lowed about three hundred dollars for the year’s 
work; that is, for travel, pony, workers, tracts, 
supplies, etc. Even this amount had to be cut from 
other work, in addition to the twenty-five per cent 
cut on that work. This meant that I had to cut 
my expenses in one of two ways: either let Jononi 
go, or get rid of my pony. For many reasons it 
seemed impossible to do without my one Bible 
woman, especially since I lived and worked alone. 
Then, too, Jononi received but four dollars a 
month, whereas the pony stood me about seven dol- 
lars a month, so I decided to let the pony go, which 


meant that some days I walked thirteen miles,— 
169 


170 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


sometimes across rice fields and over hills. This: 
little incident may help illustrate how deep a 
“cut” may go when applied on the field. 

At this same session the Executive Committee 
requested that I work in the jungle but six months. 
in the year and spend the rest of the time doing 
evangelistic work among the zenana or shut-in 
gentlewomen of Gauhati. Realizing that among 
other considerations the Executive Committee 
sought to save me the strain and wear of continu- 
ous work and residence in the jungle, did not 
lessen my intense disappointment over their action. 
From the first many of our missionaries questioned 
the expediency of a woman living alone so widely 
separated from colleagues, but I think none ques- 
tioned the need of someone living in the midst of 
our Christian villages, where there was an apparent 
tendency to revert to non-Christian customs and 
standards. Being normal, I could not really relish 
the loneliness, but thought it not too great a price 
to pay until someone else should be sent to work 
with me, or better still, until a husband and wife 
should come and work the field together. 

Failure to keep up the Hahim road and bridges 
made that place an impossible working base. We 
agreed that the permanent camp-house should be 
built .at Boko, a village on the main cart road 
thirty-seven miles from Gauhati. Boko is the Gov- 
ernment post-office for the surrounding country. 
All my Hahim mail was sent from and received 





A FRIENDLY HINDU FAMILY OF GOOD CASTE 





WAYSIDE MINISTRIES 171 


there. A great market gathers at Boko, Friday 
night and Saturday morning. It is the business 
center and rendezvous for Christians from more 
than a dozen villages. From Hahim we used to 
visit the market where we sold medicines, tracts, 
Gospels, played the organ and sang to gather 
crowds to listen to the Gospel. From the Govern- 
ment I secured an ideal piece of land along the 
river and on the road traveled by hundreds on 
bazaar days. Here I built a storeroom and gath- 
ered material for the permanent “ house by the side 
of the road.” While a coolie looked after the Boko 
material, I was able to rent a little two-room bunga- 
low at Jungakoli, six-and-a-half miles back in the 
forest reserve. The place seemed designed to meet 
my very need. The house was built on a hill-top 
on posts twelve feet above the ground. I had the 
downstairs walled in and partitioned into a dining- 
room, little storeroom and large assembly-room, 
where the people gathered for Sunday school, Bible 
class, and entertainments. Fresh tints on the 
walls and oil on the woodwork made the place 
ready for my nice furniture, pretty draperies and 
good pictures. The finishing touch was a fence 
around a garden plot we tried to cultivate in front. 
All the time I occupied this bungalow, women came 
day after day to know if they might go up- 
stairs and see the curtains, pictures, chairs, bed, 
looking-glass, etc. 

Across the river sawyers had cut down great sal 


172 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


trees—the only wood that white ants have any 
difficulty in reducing to powder. They cut the logs 
into required lengths which they rolled on to a 
trestle built in the hillside. One sawyer stood on 
top of the trestle and drew a big saw-blade up 
through the log; while the second sawyer stood 
below and drew the saw back. This was the primi- 
tive method used for sawing all the timber for the 
Boko camp-house, except the flooring, door and 
window-frames which were made by up-to-date 
machinery in our Mission Industrial School in Jor- 
hat, and shipped to us. In spite of the crafty de- 
ception of the workmen, the delays in getting ma- 
terials, and other disappointments, those months 
at Jungakoli were rich in happiness—happiness in 
the service of each day as it came and happiness 
in the years of service planned. 

On Sundays, after Sunday school, a band of boys 
and girls went with me to visit non-Christian vil- 
lages where we explained Bible pictures and the 
hymns we sang. We invited the people to the 
house and to the magic-lantern picture which we 
showed on a big sheet stretched between two trees 
at the foot of our hill. The lantern is a mighty 
evangelistic agency. Illiterate and educated Hindu 
and Mohammedan alike often refer to Christianity 
as the white man’s religion,—a thing of the West 
symbolized largely by clothes (especially shoes, 
stockings and sun-hat). But let these objectors 
spend an hour or two squatting in the fields out 


WAYSIDE MINISTRIES 173 


under the stars looking at pictures of a country of 
hills and streams, of grain fields and palm-trees, 
like those of their own countryside, and watch tur- 
baned men and women in familiar flowing drapery, 
move about in bare or sandaled feet, speak with the 
very gestures of their own neighbourhood, use their 
own familiar plow and yoke, their grass household 
broom, open-lipped lamp, earthen vessels, and mill- 
stone ground by two, and ever as they watch 
the screen, they see in the midst of these picture- 
folk that seem like neighbours, using their own 
familiar things of the field and home, the Christ 
of the Christians going about doing good. Ever 
after they can think of Christ as belonging to them 
in an intimate sense, as being more like themselves 
than like the Europeans who preach about Him. 
Then they are willing to believe that the Christ of 
the Christians was born, not in the cold lands of 
the north, to people of white skin, but that God 
sent Him to a sunny south-land to a people of tan 
skin. Non-Christians, who were not willing that 
the Gospel be preached in their village, asked that 
these pictures be shown there, that the women and 
children might see them. 

Some weeks the slides were shown in villages, 
in bazaars, at Jungakoli, and out on the highway 
where two roads meet, three or four nights. Dur- 
ing the cold season the dew begins to fall heavily 
right after sunset. Those in the audience who wore 
shawls or blankets crouched in them as in a tent, 


174 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


only their eyes peering through the open flap. 
Even so, they got wet and chilled and I had to 
swish the dew from the lantern table where it 
trickled as though it had rained. Always after the 
pictures and talk, I asked if there were any ques- 
tions to be asked about the pictures or about Chris- 
tianity? I would throw on the screen Hunt’s pic- 
ture of Christ, light in hand, knocking and waiting 
outside a fast-closed door, and leave the picture 
there while waiting for questions. One night in a 
sal grove near Boko, when I asked if there were 
any questions, a young Hindu farmer, a stranger 
to schools and books, replied, “‘‘ Questions’! If 
you were to answer the questions that only I could 
ask, you would be kept late. It is all so new and 
strange, so different from anything that we ever 
heard; how can we understand it when we have 
heard but once? I have followed the lantern and 
seen and heard three times, so I begin to under- 
stand a little. Missahib, I think if you stay here 
long enough, and tell us often enough, we’ll under- 
stand and may all become Christians.” But there 
are 27,000 villages just in Assam, so not many have 
a chance to hear even three times. 

Christmas Eve, 1922, I showed these Gospel pic- 
tures to a group of Hindu purdah women, most of 
whom were Brahmins. We began with the Babe 
born in the manger, followed Him through child- 
hood to manhood, and His ministry in Galilee and 
Judea, the scenes of His popularity and of grow- 


WAYSIDE MINISTRIES 175 


ing opposition to Him, His cruel trial and death, 
the empty tomb, His presence with His disciples 
as they walked by the way and in the Emmaus 
home and in our midst, outside every heart’s door 
until it is opened, thereafter an ever-present Friend, 
“nearer indeed than breathing, closer than hands 
and feet.”” When I asked the women if they had 
understood the story and pictures, after some mo- 
ments of quiet, a low-voiced young Brahmin widow 
said, ‘‘ Missahib, I don’t understand how they 
could treat Him so cruelly, when He was so kind 
and good? ” For a second I had no answer, then 
I told my Hindu friend that I did not know how 
it could be, but that in all the years I had known 
Christ, He had been unfailingly kind and loving 
to me, yet, though I had not nailed Him to a tree, 
in other ways I had been ungrateful, as unworthy 
and as unkind to Him, as those in the picture were. 
I thought it must be because we do not think 
enough about Christ to grow like Him and so to be 
always kind and loving as He is. 


X 
CHRISTMAS ON A MISSION STATION 


N 1922 it was neither feasible nor possible to 
l have the Christmas tree at Hahim, as I had 
planned. This was a keen disappointment 
until I realized that God had wise and good rea- 
sons for overruling my plans and desires; that it 
was not by accident that they had failed, nor had 
God arbitrarily frustrated them. I had Christmas 
in Gauhati, and it was a happy, busy time. 
Christmas Eve I started off with a Sunday-school 
picture-roll of the birth of Christ, and my hands 
full of picture postals and tracts. Some of the 
postals were those gay Christmas cards sewed to- 
gether with coloured silk in long, blanket stitches, 
in sets and in house shapes. As I went along the 
road children saw the pictures and began to beg 
for them. I told them that if they would come 
with me to the Assamese carpenter’s house they 
would hear a beautiful story about the big picture 
rolled up under my arm, and after I had told them 
the story I would give them a picture. Quite a 
number followed to the section where the carpen- 
ter lives. The Assamese carpenter is a Hindu, the 
father of seven daughters and ason. The boy and 


five of the girls have read in our school, so know 
176 


CHRISTMAS ON A MISSION STATION 177 


something of the Boy Who long ago in Joseph’s 
carpenter-house ‘‘ increased in wisdom and stature 
and in favour with God and man.” Two of the 
girls are over thirteen years of age, so they have 
to remain indoors or in their father’s court-yard 
until they are married. When I am in Gauhati, 
I have a little Sunday school in their house. From 
the dusty road, a step up of a foot or so brings 
one directly on to the tiny veranda, and thence into 
the “ baita kana,” or waiting-room, the public room 
beyond which men are usually not allowed. Four 
dusty, cobweb-laden pictures of Hindu gods and 
goddesses adorn the walls. I took down a picture 
of Krishna playing his flute and in its place hung 
the picture of the infant Christ in Mary’s lap with 
wide-eyed cattle and adoring shepherds gazing 
upon Him. The carpenter’s children know a num- 
ber of our hymns, so we sang, “‘ While Shepherds 
Watched Their Flocks,” ‘He Has Come! The 
Christ of God,” ‘“‘ Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne ”’ 
and Luther’s Cradle Song. Some of the other 
Hindu children standing about tried to sing with 
us. Then I told the glad, sweet story of Christ 
coming to earth as a weak little baby to bring 
peace to men and to tell them of God’s love and 
good-will. For our memory verse we studied, 
‘Unto you is born this day in the city of David, 
a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” As he was 
able to repeat the verse perfectly, each child re- 
ceived one of the blanket-stitched cards. It was 


178 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


thrilling to see thirteen-year-old boys vie with eight- 
year-old girls to repeat the verse perfectly before 
the pack of special cards was exhausted. Thirty- 
two non-Christian children learned the text that 
morning. 

Then I went to a Mohammedan section, stopped 
at the tailor’s and hung the picture on a tree in his 
court-yard. None but the tailor’s wife and two 
children would listen to the story. As they could 
not help with the singing, I sang only Luther’s 
Cradle Song and passed on, meaning to go right to 
the bungalow. But on the way I saw twoscore 
or more men and boys playing football on the 
Police-Green. Some of the boys asked for pictures, 
so I hung the Christmas picture on a tree by the 
roadside and the men and boys stopped their game 
and listened to the story of the birth of the Son 
of God. Afterwards they, too, had pictures, and 
three or four cart-men passing by, jumped from 
their carts and asked for a picture with reading on 
it, and went off with Christian tracts. 

In the afternoon some of the little girls from the 
boarding school went with me to tell the same won- 
derful story in song and speech to the wretched 
Deshwalli squatters who live by the entrance to 
Satribari. “Live,” did I say? They stay there 
in grass shacks, laughing together in the morning, 
quarrelling in the afternoon, and making peace or 
continuing war at night. They sit, smoke, eat, and 
suffer with fever, right in the middle of the road. 


CHRISTMAS ON A MISSION STATION 179 


Some of their children seem semi-imbecile and 
some are as bright and beautiful children as I have 
seen anywhere. The fact that they seem to miss 
nothing, that they are evidently unconscious of 
their abject wretchedness, shows how dormant or 
nearly dead their moral sense is. At first I could 
hardly endure trying to tell them of Christ—they 
were so heedless and rude that I felt helpless. 
Then I remembered that the message I have is the 
“power of God unto salvation” and can cause 
even such as these to “ arise from the dead.” 

Before dinner that night the Satribari girls came 
to the bungalow to sing Christmas carols and re- 
ceive the gifts which were distributed from the 
boxes sent out from America. What dandy, gen- 
erous boxes they were! . . . 

After dinner the magic-lantern was taken to a 
school which the Mission runs for high caste chil- 
dren in a section of the town where Assamese gen- 
tlefolk live. Here we showed slides on the life of 
Christ to Hindu purdah women. What a contrast 
the quiet attention of these women furnished to the 
afternoon audience of Deshwalli squatters! After 
finishing describing the slides, I asked if there were 
any questions,—if the pictures had been under- 
stood. After a moment’s quiet, a gentle-voiced 
woman said, “‘ The last of the pictures were so sad! 
How could they be so cruel to one so kind and 
good?” Then I knew that the pictures had told 
their story well. 


180 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


Monday morning at Chota (early breakfast) we 
found generously filled stockings over the backs of 
our chairs and had fun unwrapping our gifts. 
There was a morning service on the old compound, 
followed by sports and tea on the lawn. I ran 
away from the sports to visit in the homes of the 
neighbourhood to invite the women and children 
to a magic-lantern talk in the church that night just 
after dark. Women came from only one house- 
hold, but some forty children sat on the front 
benches and watched with eager eyes and remarks. 
as the life of Christ was pictured for them. 

Christmas Day closed with dinner and a happy 
social evening. Maybe you are as keen as my 
mother to know what we had to eat? Fruit cock- 
tail, soup, roast goose, dressing, baked corn, salad, 
a tart red jelly something like cranberry sauce, 
mince pie, plum-pudding with butter sauce, candy, 
almonds, and coffee. Now was it not foolish of my 
little mother to grieve on such occasions because 
she thought I had nothing good to eat? As we 
said “ good-night ” to our host and hostess, some 
of us tiptoed to the side of the bed where baby 
Margaret slept, and we marveled anew at the wis- 
dom of God in sending the world’s Saviour to earth 
as a helpless Babe needing a woman’s loving care. 

No! it was not the Christmas I had planned, but 
who could ask for a richer, more blessed two days? 


XI 
LAST DAYS IN ASSAM: ORDERED HOME 


FTER Christmas one of my dear Scotch 
A friends went with me to Jungakoli for a 

two weeks’ Bible class for former Satri- 
bari students and a week’s tour of bazaar centers. 
As most of our old girls had babies and household 
duties that prevented them from leaving home, 
only six were able to spend the two weeks in Bible 
study. Some of the girls brought questions that 
showed they had been thinking and studying since 
leaving school. Classes were held from nine to 
eleven, and two to four. We had Bible drill in 
locating and quoting favourite passages, worked 
out an outline of the prophets, studied some of the 
women of the Bible, and translated Andrew Mur- 
ray’s Working for God. Sunami was one of the 
original eight girls sent to Satribari by the women 
of the Christian Association. After finishing her 
school-work she returned to her village and was 
married to a young man who had been appointed 
as teacher-pastor in a non-Christian village where 
several had accepted the Christian faith. Sunami 
had a little girl about eighteen months old at the 
time of the Bible class. While studying the prayer 
Christ gave us, Sunami asked, ‘‘ Missahib, do you 
think it means that you must forgive everything, 


no matter what it is? ” 
181 


182 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


“Yes, I think it means just that, Sunami, if we 
expect Christ to forgive us everything, no matter 
what it is. ‘ Forgive us our debts, as we forgive 
our debtors.’ ” 

‘““Oh, but Missahib, it is so hard sometimes to 
forgive everything like that!” 

“ Yes, Sunami,” I said, “it is one of the hardest 
tasks to which Christ calls us.” A sober earnest- 
ness in Sunami’s face and voice made me remember 
her question. 

Imogini, one of the girls attending the Bible 
class, had suffered with ingrowing eyelashes from 
childhood. Twice while she was at Satribari, we 
operated on her eyelashes, but the trouble recurred 
and for a year Imogini had sat in a corner of the 
house able to see only a shaft of light and expect- 
ing that this, too, would soon be swallowed up in 
darkness. After two weeks’ pleading the girl’s 
father consented to her going to Calcutta to see if 
anything could be done to help her. The last night 
that she was with us, I took the blind girl for a 
walk. Seeing tears roll down her cheeks, I sup- 
posed Imogini was fearful of what might await her 
in Calcutta, so began to speak comfortingly to her. 
“No, no, Missahib! I am not crying because of 
what might be; that is not in my mind. I am 
thinking how good God is! Fora year I sat in the 
house and never hoped to go about again. I did 
not even go to church. Now I have already jour- 
neyed across three rivers to come here. I am 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 183 


visiting, hearing the voice of friends, and learning 
about the Bible, and I am to go to Calcutta. I 
thought God had forgotten me and just see what 
good things He has done for me! I’m crying be- 
cause I am happy. I know now that God was 
planning these good things for me all the time I 
supposed He had forgotten all about me!” 

Imogini’s sight could not be restored, but she 
was admitted to a Calcutta school for the blind and 
is living happily with other sightless girls and 
women learning Braile, basketry and knitting, so 
that when she returns to her village she need no 
longer sit useless in a corner. 

Up to this time most of my touring had been in 
non-Christian villages. Until building the camp- 
house at Boko should keep me in that place I pur- 
posed to spend most of the time making six-day 
visits to our Christian villages. Usually I was 
quartered in the schoolhouse or church. The day 
began with morning prayers with the women and 
children, for I coveted for all of our Christians the 
strength and joy of family prayers in each home, 
and hoped to help the women to have this. After 
early breakfast I visited in the homes, calling at 
every house in the village. In the afternoon the 
women came to sew. Most of them were very 
clever at weaving, but few of them knew anything 
about needlework; and how eager they were to 
learn and how loath to put the needle away when 
the sun drew close to the western hills and they had 


184 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


to go home to prepare the evening rice, while 
Jononi and I sought out those in the village who 
no longer walked in the Christian way but were 
under church discipline. 

In all these interviews with offending and of- 
fended Christians, I realized anew how like our 
human nature is in spite of the differences in the 
colour and customs of the races. Jononi’s father 
had not been to church for more than a year. He 
said that he had been falsely accused and placed 
under church discipline. He was offended and 
hurt, so would not attend any of the church ser- 
vices. Then when his fellow Christians seemed 
not to notice his absence and failed to remonstrate 
with him for it, his feelings became more and more 
hurt and he said that they did not run after him 
because he was poor and ignorant! We persuaded 
him to attend services the next Sunday, and he 
found many calloused brown hands seek his in 
greeting and gladness that brown tongues find diffi- 
culty in phrasing. 

In Santipur we called on a man who had taken 
to drink and had not been to church for two years. 
He had just returned from his work in the fields, 
weary, dusty, and hungry. As he squatted under 
the eaves of his cottage while Jononi and I stood 
in the courtyard, he looked me straight in the eyes 
and began this story: ‘“ Yes, Missahib, I have not 
been to church for two dry seasons, and,” bowing 
his head and speaking low, faltering words, “TI 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 185 


drink with the heathen. It was like this: we had 
been long married and had no children. Then this 
boy came, and oh, Missahib, he was a wonderful 
boy! Then he had hard fever, very hard. We 
went to the jungle and got all the roots and leaves 
that are good for fever but it did no good. He 
got hotter and hotter and died. When he died they 
were drinking in that heathen village across the 
river. I went over and drank with them until I 
forgot all about it. And ever since, when they 
make rice beer over there, I go over and drink until 
I forget again.” 

“ Are you happy drinking rice-beer and forget- 
ting about a wonderful boy God gave you?” I 
asked the man. 

A big, dusty hand wiped tears from a face lined 
with suffering. 

“God knows, I am not happy! But, Missahib, 
God cannot be the kind of God you say He is. 
Why did He let my boy die? ” 

“That I do not know,” I replied, “but I do 
know that God’s love may be safely trusted in life 
and death. How can we who are familiar with 
only this little courtyard of life, know the why 
of God’s inviting our children, who are also His 
children, into the life of His Home? All of love 
that we know we have learned of Him; surely we 
may trust our dear ones to Him Who is also their 
Father and Who uses the terms of parenthood to 


186 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


help us understand the tenderness of His love and 
of His desire for our welfare? ” 

Just then I noticed a baby creeping about the 
courtyard and asked whose child it was. Almost 
casually the man answered, “ Oh, that is mine. 
But he is just like all the children in the village; he 
is not the wonderful boy the other was.” 

“Don’t you think that if you give up drink and 
go back to the Christian way—if you become to: 
this little one the good father you were to your 
other son,—don’t you think that maybe God will 
help this baby become the same wonderful sort of 
child your other son was? ” 

And the bereaved man cried, “Oh, Missahib, 
Id like to try it!” 

And there in the courtyard where the ordinary 
baby was playing about, we thanked our Father 
that in His wisdom and love He has seen fit to set 
us in families and let us know the joy and blessing 
of little ones in our homes. And we thanked Him 
for His Father-love and patience that encourages 
us to get up from a tumble and reach out for His. 
strong, steadying hand while trying to learn to walk 
and find our way Home. 

The next prayer-meeting night this man walked 
again along the neglected path to the little church- 
school and standing in front of his neighbours, said, 
“ You all know what kind of a man I have been 
these last months, so I do not need tell you that. 
But you do not know what an unhappy man I have 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 187 


been. I want to come back and try again, if you 
will give me another chance.” The other chance 
was given, and the man made good. 

In Sunami’s village I learned that just previous 
to the Bible class Sunami’s husband had been ex- 
pelled from the school he taught, because of love 
letters sent and improper advances made to one of 
the girls in his school. While he was teaching 
school, Sunami had done considerable work on their 
cultivation. The sun had put streaks of straw 
colour through the black strands of her hair; wind 
and sun had roughened her skin; the hoe had cal- 
loused her hands; and she looked fagged and weary. 
Her husband complained to her that she was not 
good enough for him, that she did not please him 
as the younger girl did. Then I remembered the 
pointed question about forgiveness that Sunami had 
asked in Bible class. The people in her village said 
that not once had they heard her reply to her hus- 
band’s taunts. As we talked of her problem, this 
girl out of the tragic experiences of her young life 
taught her old teacher a lesson on love, “ Missa- 
hib,” she said, “ I know now, why God makes us 
forgive like that. It is because He wants us to be 
happy and we can’t be happy if we do not forgive. 
I know if I live a true Christian life that my hus- 
band will become a Christian again and love me.” 
A letter I received from Sunami, reports that her 
husband is back in the church, superintendent of 
the Sunday school, and all is again well with my girl. 


188 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


On Sundays some of the men and older boys 
would accompany me to neighbouring non-Chris- 
tian villages where we sang and talked of Jesus. 
On these trips the men did most of the talking. 
Their method of approach was usually something 
like this: 

“No; we are not working in our fields today, 
because we are Christians and give one day in the 
week to serving the Lord who sends sun and rain 
to make our rice grow. We used to be just like 
you—did all the things you do and were afraid of 
all the things you are afraid of. Why, at night we 
wouldn’t pass that bamboo clump at the fork of 
the fields, where you say that evil spirits live. We 
didn’t like to pass it alone during the day either, 
and no one could have paid us to cut a bamboo 
from it. But now that we are Christians, we do 
not believe in evil spirits, so we cut bamboos from 
this clump just as freely as from any other clump. 
It is the same way with all the rocks we used to 
fear as places where evil spirits stay. It is very 
good not to be afraid of trees and rocks. 

“How many people in this village can write 
their name or read the wrapper around a bottle of 
quinine tablets? Not one! That’s just the way it 
used to be in our village before we were Chris- 
tians! But in most Christian villages many boys 
and girls go to school and can write letters and 
read books through. They can read for them- 
selves a Book God wrote for us—for you and for 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 189 


us—and it is the things written in His Book that 
make us so different from what we used to be, that 
we are like new people. And these are the things 
we have come to tell you about.” 

So often the older people responded to the mes- 
sage by saying, “ Tell these things to young peo- 
ple, but we are too old to change our thoughts or 
customs or lives. We have lived as Hindus, and 
as Hindus we will die.” 

Before finishing the tour of the Christian vil- 
lages I accidentally discovered that I had lost 
the hearing of my right ear, so went to Cal- 
cutta to see a specialist, hoping to return to 
Assam after a fortnight and begin to build the 
Boko house. In order to secure the ear special- 
ist’s services, I had to enter the Presidency Gen- 
eral Hospital and was put in the ward where I had 
visited Nettie, my bed looking out on the veranda 
bed she used to occupy. After the first examina- 
tion, the surgeon told me that I ought not to live 
in Assam or any other damp place. Remembering 
the house to be built “ by the side of the road,” I 
hardly considered his opinion. Before the second 
examination I had an attack of fever and was 
amused to have ice-packs put at my head, my tem- 
perature taken every hour, and the nurses told to 
keep me quietly in bed, for I had marched in the 
jungle with as high temperature, and of course 
never had ice. But it seemed a more serious mat- 
ter after the next interview with the surgeon in 


190 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


which he said that under no circumstances should 
I return to the jungle, but that I ought to return 
to the United States and live in some dry, non- 
malarial section. When I suggested that he take 
care of my ear and ignore the malaria, he assured 
me that the two were closely connected, that the 
malaria was of the malicious type and had been too 
long ignored. He predicted that if I returned to 
work in the jungle, that certainly before two 
months I would have to be carried out. 

I had come to consider that all the previous 
years of my life had been in preparation for the 
service of the “ house by the side of the road,” so 
these physical developments seemed a nightmare 
from which I must shortly waken. Just when car- 
penters were to have commenced work on the per- 
manent house at Boko, I went to dismantle the 
Jungakoli bungalow, pack my belongings, dispose 
of the cattle, and bid my old friends farewell. 
There was a woman at Boko named Satmi, whom 
I particularly hated to leave. I found Satmi in a 
village of opium-eating Garo squatters. When I 
asked her if she had ever heard of Jesus Christ, she 
amazed me by replying that she was a Christian. 

“You a Christian and in this village of opium 
eaters! How does that happen? ” I asked. 

“Tt was this way, Missahib,” said Satmi. 
“When I was a child I lived up in Kotiatoli, 
in Nowgong district, and Mr. Moore baptised me. 
Then I married one of the boys of that place and 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 191 


afterwards he ran away with someone else. Then 
so many of the people were sick with Kalaazhar 
and so many had died of it, that the rest of them 
went away to different villages wherever they could 
find a place to stay. My mother and father died 
and I ran away and stayed in the village of the 
man in whose house I am now. Cultivation in that 
village was poor, so we moved around and finally 
came here. Everybody here eats opium. My hus- 
band ate it and then I did.” 

“Satmi, do you remember anything about 
Jesus? ” 

“JT remember that we used to have a church- 
building where we went Sundays,” the woman an- 
swered, ‘‘ and some other times, and that we used 
to pray, but I cannot remember what we prayed. 
And we used to sing songs that were different from 
the songs that the heathen sing, but I cannot re- 
member these, either.” 

“Would you like to give up opium, Satmi? ” 

“Oh, Missahib, who that eats it would not like 
to give it up!” So we knelt in front of her eight- 
by-ten hut and asked God to enable Satmi to do 
this very difficult thing. Then I went back to camp. 

The next morning I sought out Satmi and asked 
her if she had taken opium since I had seen her. 

Looking in my face she replied without stammer 
or hesitation, “‘ Yes, Missahib. Did you see that 
man by the side of the house when you went? 
Well, as soon as you left, he offered mesome. Now 


192 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


' wouldn’t it have been a pity not to have taken it 
when I could get it for nothing? ” 

“‘ Satmi, if I had been here would you have taken 
atts 

A slight shadow of trouble rested on her face 
as Satmi answered with deliberation, ‘“‘ No, Missa- 
hib; I think not; because you wouldn’t have 
liked it.” 

“ You are right, Satmi, I wouldn’t have liked it. 
But Satmi, I never saw you before yesterday, never 
knew anything about you; I never even heard of 
you before. It is because Christ cares about your 
taking opium, oh, so much more than I could, 
that I care. He does more than care. He can 
help you, but Icannot. Ina few minutes I’ll have 
to go away again, but He never has to leave you. 
And, Satmi, you can talk to Him at any time; you 
do not even have to move your lips to do it, and 
He will close your fist so tightly that no one can 
force opium into it.” Again we knelt to ask the 
ever-present Saviour to help Satmi win her battle. 

The next morning when I sought Satmi out, she 
reported victory, and also the day following. The 
fourth day she said, “‘ No, Missahib, I haven’t had 
opium, but Iam sick.” So I gave her medicine for 
the disorder that troubles anyone breaking with a 
drug habit. 

About six weeks later I was again on tour in 
Satmi’s neighbourhood, and sought her out. Be- 


‘LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 193 


fore she could report, an old man of the village 
came to me and said, “‘ Missahib, give me some of 
that medicine like you gave Satmi. She has quit 
opium, and I want to give it up, too.” 

Satmi interposed excitedly, ‘“‘ Medicine does not 
make you give up opium. I trusted God and He 
helped me give it up. Then when I had given it 
up, I got sick. And when I got sick, the Missahib 
gave me medicine! Now if you want to give up 
opium, you’ll have to trust God and He will help 
you give it up. Then you will get sick. And then 
the Missahib will give you medicine!” 

Before making my farewell visit to Satmi, I 
asked God for a message for her—something that 
could stay by and help her after I had been for- 
gotten. And I looked through that rich old store- 
house of truth, but found nothing that satisfied me. 
All the way along the narrow trail through the 
jungle grass, I sought for a message, but none 
came. Satmi brushed a clean place in front of her 
straw shack and placed her inverted rice-pounder 
for a seat for me. In the gully by Satmi’s house 
the first rains had brought out the early pink lilies, 
in the parched grass of the long dry season. This 
stubble mixed with cow dung was fashioned into 
thin flat cakes which were dried in the sun and 
used for fuel. These with a shadow of wings on 
the courtyard and the “ caw, caw,” of the crows, 
gave me Satmi’s message. 


194 SOWING SEED IN ASSAM 


“‘ Satmi, Satmi, come here and look at the crows; 
for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have 
storehouse nor barn: and God feedeth them: How 
much more are you better than the fowls? And 
Satmi, look at the lilies how they grow: they toil 
not, they spin not; and yet I tell you truly, that 
the Raja in all his durbar-glory was not arrayed 
like one of these. If then, God so clothe the grass, 
which is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast 
into the oven, how much more will He provide for 
your ” 

Over and over again I repeated the verses, then 
asked Satmi to say them back to me. 

Then I said, “ Satmi, after I have gone, I want 
you to say these words to the other women and 
children here in the village. And if anyone ever 
tells you that God doesn’t care about you and that 
it doesn’t make any difference to Him what hap- 
pens to Satmi, then I want you to say these verses 
to yourself. That is why I want to be sure that 
you have them.” 

Shaking her head, Satmi replied, “ Missahib, 
I’ve never been to school, how can I say all those 
words like you said them? But I can say them this 
way: When I see the flowers and hear the birds 
I'll say, ‘ Satmi, the birds say, and the flowers say, 
God thinks about us, and looks after us. You are 
much bigger than we are, Satmi, so He thinks 
about you, too, and will take care of you.’ ” 


LAST DAYS IN ASSAM 195 


This is just a little glimpse of the grain ripened 
in one small corner of the great field. Was the 
little lone reaper taken from the field and from 
active service in order to give this report, and to 
show that even the least-skilled and the most un- 
worthy, may go at the bidding of the Lord of the 
harvest and with the sickle of love help to gather 
in the sheaves? 


THE END 





Books on CHINESE LIFE 


The Gateway to China 
By Mary Ninde Gamewell 
Pictures of Syne Vises and To-day 
A new, revised edition. Mrs. Gamewell hee con- 
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New Lanterns in Old China 
y Theodora Marshall Inglis 

Stories of Chinese life & ihe wife of Dr. John In- 
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The Chinese Boy and Girl 


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Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes 


By Isaac Taylor Headland 
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China the Mysterious and Marvelous 


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China from Within 


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OTHER BOOKS ON CHINA 

The Chinese as They Are 

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Chinese Heart Throbs 

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Village Life in China By Arthur H. Smith 

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Chinese Characteristics 

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The Education of Women in China 

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Notable Women. of Modern China 

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The Foreign Relations of China 
$4.00, By Mingchien Joshua Bau, M.A., Ph.D, 





TRAVEL AND DISCOVERY 


JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S. 


Author of “Wonder Tales of the Ancient World,” 
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A Century of Excavation in the Land 
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D. E. LORENZ, Ph.D. 
The ’Round the World Traveller 


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Hawaiian Historical Legends 

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SOCIOLOGICAL 
ROGER W. BABSON 


Recent Labor Progress 
With Special Reference to the Work of the 
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Story of Secretary Davis’ Life Trade Union Progress 


Immigration : Educational Charters 
Workmen’s Compensation Employment 
Woman in Industry Standards of Living 
Profit-Sharing Plans Child Welfare 
Conciliation The Wage System 
Naturalization Religion 


Old Age Insurance 


a 


anes 13 o 
“ atid a9 , 
by Rast 





Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 


r 


iii 











